What's the diff?

[Anon]

I'm building a site for someone who already has PHP configured on their Linux server. Apparently there are two different configurations for PHP. This company has chosen PHP to be installed as a CGI and not it's usual way.

Can anyone tell me the difference to a programmer like me? More importantly, does PHP coding change in any way/shape or form?

Thanks,
Mike

[vincente]

Running it as CGI means that everytime a PHP page is accessed, PHP must be loaded into memory, the script is passed to it, it is executed, and the results are send back to the browser.

When PHP is installed as a module in Apache, it is allways loaded by default. That saves some time and memory.

Scripts don't change much (if at all).
It's mostly a performance thing.