>From this article < http://blogs.iis.net/bills/archive/2007/05/07/iis-vs-apache.aspx> written in May of this year, the author makes this comment about IIS and PHP:
[snippet] "If you're worried about IIS performance and reliability when running PHP vs. running on Apache, you're concerns are definitely valid. Up until recently there were only two ways to run PHP: the slow way (CGI), and the unreliable way (ISAPI). :) This is primarily a result of the lack of thread-safety in some PHP extensions - they were originally written for the pre-fork Linux/Apache environment which is not multi-threaded. Running them on IIS with the PHP ISAPI causes them to crash, and take out the IIS process serving your application. "Fortunately, the Microsoft / Zend partnership has brought about fixes to these issues with many performance and compatibility fixes by Zend, and a FastCGI feature for IIS which enables fast, reliable PHP hosting. FastCGI is available now in Tech Preview form, and has also been included in Windows Server "Longhorn" Beta 3. It will be included in Vista SP1 and Longhorn Server at RTM." [/snippet] This author (employed my M$) even says that PHP ISAPI can cause IIS to crash. Am I taking the one-liner out of context? Does this happen often? What are the conditions in which it would cause it to crash? What I am currently doing is some research to see if we want to move our web server from IIS 6 to Apache 2. We will still be running on a Windows 2k3 server. So, I wanted to query the list and see what you have to say about using IIS or Apache on a Windows server - we are a Windows environment (my hands are tied there =). Our development language is only PHP at this point. We are currently using MySQL, but my supervisor is considering moving to MS SQL Server (blegh!) - any issues with Apache there? Thanks in advance, ~Philip
