Chapter 9, Problem 1PE

Explanation of Solution

Main reasons:

• The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) usually starts a new process for serving each and every request.
  • Starting a new process every time significantly increases the operating system (OS) overhead.
• Conversely, servlets are executed as threads of an already existing process.
  • Executing threads from an existing process typically reduces the OS overhead.
• Additionally, the process executing threads can be the webserver process itself.
  • This avoids the interprocess communication and thereby reducing the expenses.
• Therefore, for smaller to medium-size tasks, the overhead of Java servlets is lesser than the overhead of using CGI with a C++ or C program.
• However, for tasks with higher CPU activity, the Java servlets may not provide better performance compared to the C or C++ program with CGI.