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Asked: 2026-06-05T01:06:52+00:00

im using a python script to display text to the screen with ajax but

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im using a python script to display text to the screen with ajax but it’s laggy and sometimes not even working..

here’s the python script

#!/usr/bin/env python
import cgi, cgitb
form = cgi.FieldStorage()
q = form.getvalue('q')
print "Content-Type: text/html\n" 
print q

and the html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <script type="text/javascript">
        function show(str){
            var xmlhttp;
            if (str.length == 0){
                document.getElementById("hint").innerHTML = "";
                return;
            }
            if(window.XMLHttpRequest){
                xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest();
            }
            else{
                xmlhttp=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
            }
            xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=function(){
                if (xmlhttp.readyState==4 && xmlhttp.status==200){
                    document.getElementById("hint").innerHTML=xmlhttp.responseText;
                }
            }
            xmlhttp.open("GET","../cgi-bin/ajax_test.py?q="+str,true);
            xmlhttp.send();
        }
    </script>
</head>
<body>
    <form action="">
        <input type="text" id="txt1" onkeyup="show(this.value)" />
    </form>
    <span id="hint"></span>
</body>

is it my code’s fault? or is it because cgi/python is slow?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    While your example works just fine for me on a local OSX apache server, I would suggest that using python CGI as a backend solution to serving ajax calls would be highly inefficient. The very nature of CGI means that every single request has to spawn a process of that python script.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface

    Calling a command generally means the invocation of a newly created
    process on the server. Starting the process can consume much more time
    and memory than the actual work of generating the output, especially
    when the program still needs to be interpreted or compiled. If the
    command is called often, the resulting workload can quickly overwhelm
    the web server.
    The overhead involved in interpretation may be reduced
    by using compiled CGI programs, such as those in C/C++, rather than
    using Perl or other scripting languages. The overhead involved in
    process creation can be reduced by solutions such as FastCGI, or by
    running the application code entirely within the web server using
    extension modules such as mod_php.

    While it may function just fine locally, with just you doing tests, it will be much more impacted when you make it public facing, with multiple clients connecting.

    wsgi (or at least fastcgi) is a far superior approach to old school CGI scripts. You could use mod_wsgi if you are using apache. There is also uwsgi, gunicorn, and many other approaches I am sure. Ultimately the idea is that instead of having a stand alone script that is called for every request, you have a persistant process that is running, accepting requests, and executing functions.

    These days I think people just use the python CGI module as a learning step to writing server-side web code via python. You may want to consider moving over to a framework.

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