PyApache, couldn't geta hold of author, willing to donate sometime

[Skip Montanaro]

    Oleg> PCGI is very similar to FastCGI. It is PersistentCGI - a protocol
    Oleg> to communicate between httpd and a special CGI, that starts and
    Oleg> lives in memory, exactly like in FastCGI.
    Oleg>    http://starship.python.net/crew/jbauer/persistcgi/index.html

Unless something has changed recently, PCGI does actually fork a program for
each referenced URL.  This program marshals the input arguments and shoots
them across a socket to the long-running process.  The program is an itty
bitty C program, so presumably its startup overhead is going to be a whole
lot smaller than that of the Python interpreter.