I have been muttering about a redesign of CGI:IRC for a long time, and finally I'm getting near to having working code (not finished but working). The major change of the redesign is that the main program is not seperate for each user, there is one perl proccess that does everything. This means that it runs as a daemon proccess and therefore it needs to be running all the time, this means on the server CGI:IRC (if I can still call it that) will be more complex to install. It will mean it won't be easy to install without a shell account (but most web hosting providers aren't happy with people using CGI:IRC anyway, due to the massive resource usages). The resource usage will hopefully go from about 3-4MB per user with the CGI based CGI:IRC to a few hundred KB per user (with the possibility to be reduced even further). It will also possibily enable a refresh based chat rather than the current 'streaming' technique that is used to allow people stuck behind broken web proxies or stuck with nasty browsers (like Opera) to use it, obviously streaming will still be the default.
Obviously the old CGI:IRC will still exist if people prefer to use that, but I can see most serious users of CGI:IRC benefiting from this, apart from the case of when it is infrequenty used with few users, it might be possible to have a little wrapper that will run it only when it's needed though.
Basically, could you (as the users) let me know what you think about this? :)