FastCGI or HTTP server for C++ daemon behind nginx proxy

Question

For high performance application accessible over web interface, would it make sense to implement/reuse some http server or go with fastcgi? I was convinced that fcgi would be correct choice, but I come across https://ef.gy/fastcgi-is-pointless and now I'm not so sure..

HTTP doesn't allow handling multiple sessions at one time, but that could be solved with spawning multiple deamon and let nginx act as balancer. But it would probably be much easier to test.

On the other hand, fcgi seems like having all necessary high-performance parts already in place (multiplexing requests in one process, therefore easier to implement cache, ...).

Does HTTP have any advantage over FastCGI aside from being easier to debug?

NOTE: Security is not so much of an issue since either fcgi or http will run behind nginx proxy.

Answer 1

Acting as HTTP server will force you to implement some things which is unrelated to your app's business logic. This includes but not limited to: keep-alive, chunked encodings, decoding forms data and many other little or big things. I'd prefer to stick with fastcgi since its requires less knowledge about transport-level protocol.