PHP Optimized for Windows Server 2008

Stony Stevenson writes "It used to be that popular PHP applications would run more poorly on Windows Server than on a Linux or Unix servers, for which PHP had been optimized. Specialist in the PHP language Zend Technologies now says that's no longer the case. The Zend Core commercially supported form of PHP has been certified by Microsoft as ready to run 'with performance and stability' on Windows Server 2008, said Andi Gutmans, co-founder and CTO of Zend. Previously, PHP 'didn't run as well as it should on Windows,' said Gutmans, despite the fact that 75% to 80% of PHP users were developing on Windows workstations."

Comments

Nothing to do with optimization

[dedazo]

PHP on IIS5/6 had to run as a CGI application, because their ISAPI handler implementation was historically crappy and unstable under load. CGI under the thread-oriented (as opposed to process-oriented in *nix) pipelining model of Windows was usually not a good performer. IIS7 introduced FastCGI, which is what Zend used to "certify" PHP to run on Server 2008. But FastCGI is not an optimization, it's a new execution mode for IIS. Nor was PHP modified (AFAIK) in any way to run effectively on FastCGI. Python apps also run very well on it (which personally is more exciting to me than PHP).