Stuart Herbert, prompted by this post from Derick Rethans uses this new post to his blog to point out something that didn't seem to be mentioned and has always been a pet peeve of his when running PHP on IIS - controlling the FastCGI processes so they don't take over the machine.

Running PHP via CGI and FastCGI means that IIS has to do the Windows equivalent of fork()ing off PHP processes to do the actual PHP bit. If your box has too many PHP processes running, the box will start to swap. Once a webserver starts swapping, you've no chance in hell of keeping up with all the incoming requests, and your websites on that particular webserver become unavailable in a matter of moments.

The problem seems to have been corrected in the most recent IIS release, though and correct directions can be found here. Older versions of the web server are out of luck, unfortunately.

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In a new post today Stuart Herbert asks the question "is it possible to secure a shared server with PHP and FastCGI installed on it?" His answer follows...

The challenge with securing a shared hosting server is how to secure the website from attack both from the outside and from the inside. PHP has built-in features to help, but ultimately it's the wrong place to address the problem. [...] Before we can look at performance, the first question is: how exactly do we get PHP and FastCGI running as different users on the one web server in the first place?

He follows through on this, giving a little mini-tutorial on getting the environment installed on an Apache web server. He includes some benchmarks on the difference between using the Apache 1.3.x series and Apache 2 (generated using the ab benchmarking tool).

Recently Evert Pot has been having some issues with setting up lighttpd and PHP (fastcgi) for one of his web servers:

In trying to get more out of our webservers using a Lighttpd and PHP-FastCGI setup, I've come across some major issues that make it difficult to use. I hope this post will warn people of some of the bugs they might encounter and workaround that might need to be implemented until some of these are fixed.

He ran up against two problems - that the parent PHP-CGI process spawns off the configured number of children correctly but with the lighttpd server is killed, they don't get released and that, once you hit full capacity for the PHP backend lighttpd starts serving up 500 errors.

In the comments for the post several others have offered some advice on things that might help (like different config settings and even using XCache to prevent the 500s issue from coming up again).

In this quick post to the ApacheLounge forum, Steffen shares some stats running PHP in two different methods of running PHP on Apache - mod_php and fastcgi.

With PHP as module after some time the memory usage of Apache is growing and growing up to ~800M.
With mod_fcgid is stays on a steady ~100M
PHP configuration: only with the extension php_mysql.dll and eaccelerator.dll

A graph of the statistics is also provided.

According to the O'Reilly Port 25 blog, there's been a new release of the FastCGI component for Microsoft's IIS web server - FastCGI 6.0 - and how it works with things other than IIS7 and Windows Server 2008.

f you read Sam Raimi's How open source has influenced Windows Server 2008 and Dominic Sartorio's Dominic Sartorio on SpikeSource and Open Source Interoperability blog entries on Microsoft's Port 25 site, you might wonder if FastCGI for PHP only works with Windows Server 2008 and IIS7. Fortunately, that is NOT the case. Head over to http://iis.net/php where you can find and download FastCGI for IIS 6.0 on Windows Server 2003.

He also points out a video tutorial from Microsoft that can help you get this latest version og FasctCGI up and running on your system.

Tony Bibbs, in the wake of last week's surprise from Microsoft to Yahoo, has posted a few of his thoughts on the matter.

I woke up this morning to the news of a $44 billion buy-out offer from Microsoft for Yahoo!. This is being covered from all angles in various tech sites like Slashdot but I think the one angle I haven't seen yet is what does this mean for PHP?

He mentions the work that Microsoft and Zend have done to push PHP support on the OS (check out this email too) and he wonders what the final impact of it all could mean for the language - will things change drastically if Microsoft becomes a major player in the PHP world or would they stay behind the scenes and give the community the support it might need.

Dave Dash has posted a configuration that he had shared with him for getting nginx and the symfony framework to work happily together.

I almost gave up on nginx and was going to settle on lighttpd or Apache, but I decided to check the symfony list and in minutes Kiril Angov (Kupokomapa) answered with a working nginx configuration. This is why I like the symfony community.

He includes the config in an easy to use/c&p kind of format so you can drop it into your install and get it up and running quick.

On the Zend Developer Zone today there's a new article by Elizabeth Smith about one of the latest offerings from Microsoft to the online community - FastCGI for IIS6.

What is FastCGI? I could go on for pages about the technical background, and Microsoft already has some great documentation on the subject, however I'll put it in layman's terms for those who aren't Computer Science majors. [...] CGI is a method that a web server can use for tools like PHP, Perl, or any other language that support it. CGI spawns a new process for each request, which can be really slow. FastCGI speeds this up with a very simple solution '" instead of creating a brand new process for each request, it creates a "pool" of processes and reuses them.

She talks about her usage of PHP on Windows platforms in her work, about a move her company made from Apache to IIS and how much the FastCGI functionality helped. She also briefly explains how to get IIS and FastCGI to work together to make the PHP functionality happen.

As mentioned by both the Zend Developer Zone and Patrick Reilly on his blog Microsoft has officially announced their release of FastCGI for their IIS 6 web server version.

The IIS Team is eager to announce the official release of Microsoft FastCGI Extension for IIS 6.0 as a free download. For the first time, we are providing hosters and PHP developers full support for a stack of technology that enables reliable, scalable PHP hosting on production Internet Information Services 6.0 (IIS 6) Web servers.

Other bloggers mentioning this new release include:

• Gaetano Giunta
• Andi Gutmans
• Johnua Eichorn