Wacky Performance Problem

Hi everybody! I've put a couple messages together here and moved to php-windows... Zeev wrote: How did you perform the benchmarks? I've never performed benchmarks on large HTML files under Windows, but I must say your results are very surprising. I can't think of any reason why PHP code blocks should execute quicker than flat HTML blocks (quite on the contrary). Joel says - I must say, I'm completely suprised myself. I'd really appreciate some confirmation of my numbers, though, for all I know, I'm doing something wrong. I did the benchmarks with the apache bench utility on my linux box. Here's the straight result matrix for 100k of output. First, php3, just for comparison on the same machine: Print 100,000 of 'x' (<? 1000 * print 'xxx...xxx'; ?>) Connnection Times (ms) min avg max Connect: 2 17 33 Processing: 763 775 796 Total: 765 792 829 100,000 of 'x' (1000 * xxxx...xxxx) Connnection Times (ms) min avg max Connect: 5 13 18 Processing: 741 776 828 Total: 746 789 846 Note: This is not completely accurate, as my network is slightly overloaded at the moment. php3 hits the maximum speed of my network currently. If only php4 was so nice: Print 100,000 of 'x' (<? 1000 * print 'xxx...xxx'; ?>) Connnection Times (ms) min avg max Connect: 6 23 41 Processing: 5404 5474 5544 Total: 5410 5497 5585 100,000 of 'x' (1000 * xxxx...xxxx) Connnection Times (ms) min avg max Connect: 13 23 34 Processing: 16904 16910 16915 Total: 16917 16933 16949 Yes... That's almost 17 seconds per page load. Andi wrote: It sounds strange but I'll try and check it out. Do you by any chance have the PHP 4 source setup on your machine so that you can compile it? We could try and change a few settings. Joel says - Ack, I don't. I have a machine nearby with cygwin on it, but that's the only windows compiler I have available at the moment. I will plan on getting MS Visual whatever installed on a machine, if I can find it laying around somewhere... but for the moment I'm stuck using binaries that people give me. If it'll help get this thing goin' faster, I'll go buy/steal a copy sooner rather than later. -joel