Podcast on Running PHP on Windows
Jun 11th
Peter Laudati & Dmitry Lyalin host the edu-training Connected Show developer podcast on cloud computing and interoperability. I met Peter in Chicago during Tek-X and we along with Don and Wade recorded a podcast on evolution of PHP on the Windows Platform. We talked about the improvements made to Windows in order to support PHP, [...]
Impact of name resolution on mysql_connect perfomance
Jun 7th
I spend lot of time profiling popular PHP applications finding where exactly processing time is spent during PHP execution. Few months ago, one thing which caught my attention was performance of mysql_connect API. On my windows test bench, xdebug output showed that one call to mysql_connect was taking 0.31 seconds which is huge. While playing [...]
Work items collected from Tek-X
May 30th
Last week I was in Chicago in the company of very passionate and smart PHP programmers at Tek-X. I got to meet some well-known members of PHP community and also fellow Microsoft employees who have been working on improving PHP experience of Windows. I would admit that meeting people was the best part of Tek-X [...]
Using IIS configuration tools to manage HWC configuration
May 30th
I have seen many people built some innovative solutions on top of hostable web core (HWC) functionality which was added in IIS7. One of the questions which HWC users frequently ask is how to make IIS configuration tools (like appcmd, UI etc.) work against configuration file which their HWC instance is using. So far they [...]
WordPress widget to show WinCache statistics
May 28th
Ruslan (http://ruslany.net), who is Program Manager for WinCache project, has been showing WinCache statistics on the right sidebar of his website for quite some time. Few weeks ago I decided to do the same but instead of editing theme source code and add the information there, I decided to write a standalone wordpress widget. Two [...]
PHP PGO build for maximum performance on Windows
May 16th
In the last few years VC++ team have done some awesome work with profile guided optimizations (PGO). PGO improves performance of certain code paths which are more likely to be used in production environments. Most of the teams in Microsoft have been using this technology to speed up most commonly used scenarios. One of the [...]
Adding a PECL extension to your PHP build environment
May 15th
Last week I published winbuild.bat to setup PHP build environment on windows. In this blog I am covering how to add a PECL extension to the PHP build system. I will also show how to static link a PHP extension and how much performance benefit you can get by that. Building a PECL extension [...]