20 Hours of Downtime

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.

100% Apache-Compliant REQUEST_URI for IIS and Windows!

Ever since moving NeoSmart Technologies to a Windows server, we’ve had one headache after the other dealing with various PHP scripts that included references to $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"], and unfortunately, none of the “workarounds” or hacks provided on the internet work. Some of them are for Apache on Windows, and others work most of the time, but break the minute you introduce url rewriting or launch scripts as the default files in a directory.

REQUEST_URI for Windows is a must-install for absolutely anyone that uses IIS & PHP, no matter what software you run. It’s free, it’s one-hundred percent compatible with Apache’s own REQUEST_URI, and best of all, it’s guaranteed to work no matter what. REQUEST_URI for Windows gets whatever the user entered into the address bar – period. Nothing more, nothing less. And of course, you never have to modify a single script to make them work, this does all the work for you.

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