Although I'm not aware of the details, I understand that FastCGI is much faster than CGI (it does not spawn a new process for every incoming request), and DreamHost does support FastCGI. I've actually compiled PHP5, with eAccelerator and a bunch of other things and am running it as FastCGI, so I'm very sure it *does* work. Unfortunately, their MySQL servers are so darn slow that it just doesn't work nicely... But that's another issue.

Wim Leers

On Mar 24, 2007, at 23:09 , Khalid Baheyeldin wrote:



On 3/24/07, Jeff Griffiths <anisotropic@gmail.com> wrote:
On 3/24/07, Khalid Baheyeldin <kb@2bits.com> wrote:

> Agreed. I hope the landscape changes in favor of PHP5, but I am not
> holding my breath.

I think, er, actually I *know* that this issue has less to do with
Linux distros and more to do with shared hosts. I chose dreamhost
because not only do they have a choice of php versions, they even let
you build your own if you want to.

Yes, Dreamhost allows compiling your own version, however for any site
with non-trivial amount of traffic it is useless. The reason is that they allow
you to compile your own as a CGI, which is very very inefficient (Linux forks
a new process in realtime for every incoming request).

Here is an old article on this http://baheyeldin.com/click/389/5

So, it is really not an option.
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