Improve PHP Performance on Windows

Earlier this week, we announced a technical collaboration with Zend to improve the performance of PHP on Windows. As part of this collaboration Zend will identify and fix issues related to PHP performance/stability on Windows and submit these changes to the PHP community. The IIS team will develop a FastCGI component which will install on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server “Longhorn”. FastCGI accelerates the performance and scalability of CGI-based runtimes by pooling the threads used to execute requests.

I have heard from some folks as to why we are working to improve PHP on Windows when we have technologies like ASP.NET on the market. It is important for us to provide a great experience for customers who want to run their applications on Windows regardless of what languages or runtimes those applications use. Nothing in this collaboration changes our commitment to ASP.NET and related technologies such as the upcoming ASP.NET AJAX (formerly called ‘Atlas’).

Technology previews of Microsoft’s FastCGI component and Zend’s PHP improvements are available now – please see this page for more information about FastCGI and check out Bill Staples’ (IIS Product Unit Manager) Blog.

Namaste!