{"id":486,"date":"2007-10-10T04:14:05","date_gmt":"2007-10-10T04:14:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/2007\/fastcgi-for-iis-final-released-congratulations-to-the-iis-team\/"},"modified":"2013-08-26T18:17:05","modified_gmt":"2013-08-26T23:17:05","slug":"fastcgi-for-iis-final-released-congratulations-to-the-iis-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/neosmart.net\/blog\/fastcgi-for-iis-final-released-congratulations-to-the-iis-team\/","title":{"rendered":"FastCGI for IIS Final Released, Congratulations to the IIS Team!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Congratulations are in order for Microsoft’s IIS development team – today they’ve just announced<\/a> 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.\n<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, it’s still a huge improvement over the old way of running scripting engines for languages like PHP on Windows.\n<\/p>\n

The Problem<\/strong>: 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<\/a>. 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.\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Solution<\/strong>: Enter Microsoft’s FastCGI module. It’s a multi-threaded service that creates several processes of the scripting engine and keeps them running<\/em> thereby eliminating the overhead of creating new processes and also letting you use non-thread-safe binaries without a fear in the world.\n<\/p>\n

Despite all the bad press Microsoft seems to be getting these days from the open source community, even when they do things right<\/a>, the IIS team has really outdone itself with this project. The benchmarks are quite amazing<\/a>, and the team seems to genuinely care about pleasing open-source users on the Windows world. While PHP\/Zend has released supposedly thread-safe PHP binaries<\/a>, we’ve been using them here on NeoSmart Technologies for a while, and though they are<\/em> much better, we’ve still had the occasional access violation error w\/ a exit code indicating it was caused by non-thread-safe code.\n<\/p>\n

While most servers running PHP are also running a Unix-based operating system, it’s always good to have a choice. After all, there are<\/em> quite a few projects out there that require Windows-based servers, have some PHP scripts they’d like to run (the fact that it’s the most popular language for all those highly-used packages should be a clue), and can’t afford another to shell out the cost of another *nix machine. And, as the open-source community would say, it’s all about having as many choices as possible.\n<\/p>\n

[download<\/a>] [configuration<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[297,83,124,142,177,4],"class_list":["post-486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","tag-fastcgi","tag-iis","tag-php","tag-servers","tag-web-development","tag-windows"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t