This seems like a bit of a strange article to me. When we talk about being "slow", that is typically relative to a non-CGI technology, essentially something that keeps the code in memory ready to run. The reason CGI was "slow" was because 1) It had to start a new process for each invocation 2) When using tech that needed some form of warmup (I think PHP did??), you paid that for each invocation as well. In short, for some hobby or small setup it probably doesn't matter, and perhaps that is the authors point, but relative to an in-memory solution the situation probably hasn't changed much.