PHP really sucks. Unbelievably so. On LAMP, it’s awesome. But if you’re on a new, shiny WIMP server, PHP is the pits. PHP stability on IIS is about 1 over a million that on a LAMP server. So we’re sorry. We’re sorry we had a 20 hour outage and couldn’t do anything about because we had no idea it happened. We’re sorry we ever thought we could trust PHP on Windows/IIS for even a minute under virtually no-load without keeping our eyes on it. We’re especially sorry that NeoSmart Technologies, the blog, the forums, the downloads, the whitepapers, and all the resources were unavailable for that long.

Ever since moving to Windows, we’ve had unbelievably great results on MySQL, JSP, and ASP. But with PHP, it’s been nightmare after nightmare to no end. PHP corporation (or whatever it is) is aware of this, though they’re not confessing to any particular bugs nor are they expressing any interest in solving this. We moved to PHP 5.2 in hopes of addressing the stability – according to PHP, that was fixed. What they neglected to mention was a bunch of other bugs that still haunt PHP’s quest for stability on a Windows Server. IIS auto-restarted per our configuration, but the entire server needed a reset to get PHP working again. Ugh!

Anyway, we’re back up now, and we’re looking at some of the alternate PHP engines out there. Nothing is like PHP of course, because “there isn’t a need” for a PHP-compatible PHP replacement (then again, just by the sound of it..) but several Windows-specific “PHP compilers” exist that would take care of the issue. Then again, we could always jump down to PHP 4 – but that’s just scary. At any rate, rest assured, we’re scouring the web and working nonstop looking for a solution to this nonsense.