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+[[!meta title="How do I enable FastCGI?"]]
+### CGI vs FastCGI
+
+Normal CGI scripts are initialized, run, and destroyed for every
+single browser request. The advantage of this model is that it is
+very simple, and thus robust.
+
+If performance or latency becomes an issue, you can enable FastCGI.
+FastCGI is a web server module that speeds up your applications by
+keeping one interpreter running for multiple requests, instead of
+launching a separate interpreter for each request made while
+loading your page.
+
+### When FastCGI can help
+
+This can lead to improvements in latency (responsiveness), for
+example if:
+
+-   The language you are using takes a long time to start an
+    interpreter, or to load libraries you are importing
+-   You have a script which has significant repetitive launching
+    overhead
+-   Your scripts make the same, very large, database requests which
+    (while cached by MySQL) still have to be read from memory and
+    possibly cross an internal network
+-   You are using a web framework like CherryPy, Turbogears,
+    Pylons, or Ruby on Rails which prefers to run like a daemon
+
+### Caveats
+
+There are some complications however:
+
+-   The script in not guaranteed to die unless it kills itself
+-   If you update your fcgi script, the old process (using the old
+    script) may still be running with outdated code
+-   The Scripts service automatically load-balances scripts across
+    servers, just like regular CGI; new scripts may not even be
+    launched on the servers the old scripts are running on, and thus
+    cannot “kill all older versions of myself” since they may be on
+    different servers
+
+The canonical way around these issues is to have the script watch
+the timestamps of the files it has loaded, and kill itself if a
+modification timestamp changes. If you are using a framework such
+as CherryPy, this is already handled for you.
+
+(Minor note: This method lends itself to race conditions on very
+short timescales during an update. It is also expensive if you are
+watching many files. Other solutions include updating a single
+“watch me” file with a version or hash after every update, or using
+transactional semantics. This is almost never an issue however.)
+
+### Enabling FastCGI
+
+FastCGI is enabled by default for files with the **.fcgi**
+extension. To enable FastCGI for another extension, such as .rb,
+add the following lines to a plain text file named **.htaccess** in
+the top directory of your website:
+
+**<Files \*.rb\>  
+  SetHandler fcgid-script  
+</Files\>**
+
+To enable FastCGI for another languages, change **rb** to your
+language’s extension (e.g., **php**, **pl**, etc.)
+
+
+