PHP or CGI?

[Trinity]

Hi, first of all, apologies if this is a double-post. I just submitted the thread but it didn't appear in the forum thread list. Not sure whether it needs to be approved first or whether something messed up, but I'll try again.

I have just purchased the Professional Edition and I'm trying to decide whether to use the PHP or CGI platform.

A few details about my environment:

• The website is PHP (although pages mostly have an .htm extension thanks to some htaccess jiggery pokery).
• I have access to a cgi-bin directory at the site root.
• There are about 200 pages.

The flow chart on p16 of the Zoom user guide suggests that I should use PHP (based on the fact that this is not considered a big website) - but my question is, is there be any benefits to me using CGI rather than PHP?

Thanks.

[Ray]

You should almost definitely use PHP for a site with only 200 pages. It's simply much easier to get running.

The CGI version provides better performance but this is only noticeable if you are indexing over 10,000+ pages. Besides that, it has greater technical requirements (your hosting account must be setup to execute compiled binary CGI's -- not just simple Perl CGI scripts). But once you have it up and working of course, it runs very well.

This page should give you an idea of the performance differences we are talking about. But besides this, there's not much else that benefits the CGI version.
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/benchmarks.html

[Trinity]

Thank you Ray, that covered it perfectly.