SAWMILLFORUM

Certainly it would be nice if Sawmill supported FastCGI, or something similar, and perhaps someday we will. But for now, we've taken a different approach to solving the same problem, by having a built-in web server for Sawmill. When you run Sawmill in web server mode (which is the standard and recommended usage, rather than CGI mode), it runs all the time, and simple requests do not require new processes--Sawmill's in-memory web server process handles them immediately. This provides the same sort of benefit as FastCGI.

Do you need to run Sawmill in CGI mode? Why not just run it under its own web server, and get the faster performance that way?

I should definitely mention that Sawmill's default behavior in CGI mode is to serve every static file, including images and GIFs, using separate CGI processes. This is slow, but very easy to configure. But to get much better performance in CGI mode, you should set the "temporary directory" and "temporary directory URL" in the Preferences; that will serve all static files through the web server, so processes only need to be spawned for dynamic pages. This can make a huge different in CGI performance, especially on Windows, where the overhead of starting processes seems to be much higher than the UNIX-type operating systems.