speedier cgi and perf monitoring

[Eric S. Johansson]

I've seen a couple solutions for making CGI faster without significant 
rewrite.  The only one I've been able to locate is fastCGI.  I seem to 
recall something like speed CGI or speedy CGI but I can't find I thought 
I saw (not a puddytat).  References to this other CGI speedup tool would 
be appreciated.

But I've also been playing with performance monitoring to try and 
improve performance with a couple of CGI that are very very hard on disk 
storage.  Even so, performance isn't what I think it should be.  On the 
simple, non disk intensive CGI, running the profiler on the CGI shows 
only 0.2 seconds execution time but in reality is takng 10 seconds from 
button click to page redisplay.  The HTML is only three or four 
kilobytes of relatively simple stuff as well so transmission or 
rendering time is not a big factor.

I have some disk intensive CGI which I have measured which showed only a 
few tenth of seconds execution time but also takes sometimes 15 or 20 
seconds elapsed time.

what's curious is that I'm not seem anyway a detecting which methods are 
taking large amounts of elapsed time.  I've tried a different (albeit 
simplistic) time bases to try and measure elapsed time rather than CPU 
time but with no luck.

suggestions would be most appreciated

---eric (cartoon junkie)