Congratulations are in order for Microsoft’s IIS development team – today they’ve just announced the public availability of the final version of the IIS-FastCGI ISAPI Extension – a long-awaited and much-improved way of running just about any open-source scripting engine on IIS, safely and quickly.
The Microsoft [[MSFT]] FastCGI module for IIS 5.1, 6, and 7 (with Windows Vista and Server 2008) have been in the works for quite a while now, and we’ve been using them since the first beta release – they’re good. While the biggest benefit will be seen in using FastCGI w/ IIS7 to take advantage of the new kernel-mode caching, it’s still a huge improvement over the old way of running scripting engines for languages like PHP on Windows.
The Problem: Most open-source scripting engines like PHP and Ruby on Rails were initially developed on/for the *nix world. On Unix-based platforms, the easiest way of creating multi-threaded applications is just to run the same app twice or more (The CGI model). On Windows, that doesn’t work out so well, because it takes a lot more resources to create another process. So these engines released Windows-specific single-process multi-threaded engines; the only problem was, they weren’t stable. Too many race conditions in some very non-thread-safe code wreaked havoc on many Windows systems, with the PHP developers themselves giving “Stability on IIS” the lowest level of concern.
Don’t say you haven’t been warned: the signs have been there for a decade, available for all to see. No, you needn’t be a doctor, radiologist, or nano-technician to have seen them and heeded their warning, you just had to watch a couple of episodes of one of the 90s most popular hit TV shows ever: The X-Files. 