Robust and High Performance PHP with IIS: Using FastCGI

As a Windows user, and a former trainer on ASP and IIS, I have always wanted to build high performance PHP applications running IIS. Although I use Apache and Linux all the time, some of our customers are more comfortable with Windows and IIS. The recommended way to run stable PHP applications in IIS is CGI. But since a new process is created for each request and thrown away when the request is done, CGI efficiency is poor. Furthermore the PHP ISAPI dll was never stable enough for my needs, because ISAPI requires thread-safety, but many PHP extensions are not thread-safe. Fortunately there is an alternative open technology called FastCGI. FastCGI processes are persistent as they are reused to handle multiple requests. This solves the CGI performance problem of creating new processes for each request. In benchmarks, you can expect a x4 to x8 improvement in performance compared to plain-old CGI. Shane Caraveo of ActiveState is the author of the FastCGI wrapper for IIS. http://php.weblogs.com/fastcgi_with_php_and_iis