PHP on IIS 6

[Ryan]

FastCGI for IIS 6 claims to be a reliable and scalable PHP solution for IIS. This is for Server 2003; it comes bundled with Server 2008.

 

Overview

 

The FastCGI Extension for IIS 6.0 enables popular application frameworks that support FastCGI protocol to be hosted on the IIS web server in a high-performance and reliable way. FastCGI provides a high-performance alternative to the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), a standard way of interfacing external applications with Web servers that has been supported as part of the IIS feature-set since the very first release.

 

CGI programs are executables launched by the web server for each request in order to process the request and generate dynamic responses that are sent back to the client. Because many of these frameworks do not support multi-threaded execution, CGI enables them to execute reliably on IIS by executing exactly one request per process. Unfortunately, it provides poor performance due to the high cost of starting and shutting down a process for each request.

 

FastCGI addresses the performance issues inherent to CGI by providing a mechanism to reuse a single process over and over again for many requests. Additionally, FastCGI maintains compatibility with non-thread-safe libraries by providing a pool of reusable processes and ensuring that each process will only handle one request at a time.

 

Features

 

The Microsoft FastCGI Extension for IIS provides full support for hosting and executing FastCGI enabled applications on IIS in high performance and reliable way.

 

Some of the important features provided in this release of FastCGI Extension are listed below:

 

* Reliable hosting of non thread-safe applications (such as PHP) in FastCGI mode by enforcing single request concurrency per FastCGI process

* Support for hosting of FastCGI application frameworks on shared servers by providing necessary configurability.

* Rich set of configuration options for tweaking performance of FastCGI extension and FastCGI processes.

 

 

 

Anyone tried it yet?

[Michael]

I have run PHP on IIS6 before, but not FastCGI. I have heard reports it works upto 10x faster, but whether this is true I don't know.

 

I don't run a site which uses PHP but only ASP at the moment. Maybe Edugeek could try seeing as vBulletin is based on PHP, but then again, their host could be Linux or Windows!