Kanwaljeet Singla » PHP

Podcast on Running PHP on Windows

Kanwaljeet Singla — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 18:36:19 +0000

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

Kanwaljeet Singla — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 19:31:22 +0000

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

Kanwaljeet Singla — Sat, 29 May 2010 23:28:41 +0000

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 [...]

WordPress widget to show WinCache statistics

Kanwaljeet Singla — Fri, 28 May 2010 03:05:41 +0000

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

Kanwaljeet Singla — Sat, 15 May 2010 20:32:18 +0000

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

Kanwaljeet Singla — Fri, 14 May 2010 21:56:13 +0000

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 [...]

Setting up PHP build environment on Windows

Kanwaljeet Singla — Thu, 06 May 2010 05:18:20 +0000

One of the things I have done many times in the past year is setting up a build environment for PHP on Windows. I have been using a simple script to do this which I am releasing today with this blog. Here is the zip file contains the script winbuild.bat along with essential tools (wget [...]

Goodness of dynamic maxInstances in FastCGI

Kanwaljeet Singla — Mon, 03 May 2010 21:12:04 +0000

One of the major pain points in FastCGI 1.0 was that users were required to set maxInstances to a number which works best for their application. Many users didn’t tune this value and were running FastCGI with default value of maxInstances which didn’t give them optimal performance. We recommended users to set maxInstances to (10 [...]

What’s new in WinCache 1.1 Beta2 and what’s next

Kanwaljeet Singla — Mon, 03 May 2010 18:56:42 +0000

After WinCache 1.0 release, two most requested features were user cache and session cache. We added both of these features in WinCache 1.1 beta1. We are very happy with the rate of adoption of user cache by PHP application developers. Many application developers have already added support for WinCache user cache in their applications and [...]

How to add traces to IIS log from PHP

Kanwaljeet Singla — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 03:08:24 +0000

One of the new features added to FastCGI module in IIS 7.5 is ability to use IIS tracing infrastructure from FastCGI applications. This feature request was made by a customer who wanted to consolidate logging of the request processing in one log. All IIS events were present in IIS trace logs but traces generated by [...]

Comparing WinCache user cache APIs with other caches

Kanwaljeet Singla — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 21:28:20 +0000

WinCache 1.1 beta release added two new major features to WinCache. These are user cache APIs which can be used to store custom data in the cache and “wincache” session handler. User cache APIs was the biggest feature gap WinCache 1.0 had compared to other caching solutions which are frequently used on Linux. WinCache 1.1 [...]

Application specific mapping in FastCGI ISAPI 1.5

Kanwaljeet Singla — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 03:25:49 +0000

IIS team recently released FastCGI ISAPI 1.5 for IIS 5.1 and IIS 6.0. One of the major new features added in this release is per application process pools. Per application process pools allow users to specify a unique FastCGI mapping for a particular web application in fcgiext.ini. Using this functionality administrators can now choose to [...]

Inconsistencies in wincache statistics page explained

Kanwaljeet Singla — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 08:11:01 +0000

Problem description Many customers running WinCache reported seeing different cache statistics on consecutive requests to wincache.php. Specifically, cache uptime and opcode cache summary returned second time by wincache.php was completely different than the data returned first time. Occasionally data shown in the opcode cache summary table didn’t match the chart displayed on its side. [...]

Feature additions and bug fixes coming up in WinCache

Kanwaljeet Singla — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:35:00 +0000

We are seeing huge momentum behind adoption of WinCache. In the month of September, WinCache v1 Beta was downloaded more than 13,000 times making it one of the most downloaded IIS extensions in the first month following its release. Many happy customers chose to run it on their production servers despite its beta tag. We got very encouraging feedback from the beta release and we are pushing hard for our next release. Our next release date is approaching fast and I wanted to give an update on new features and bug fixes.

Migrating FastCGI configuration from IIS 5.1/6.0 to IIS 7.0/7.5

Kanwaljeet Singla — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:18:00 +0000

Problem

As you know FastCGI functionality on IIS 5.1 and IIS 6.0 is provided by FastCGI ISAPI extension which is available as an independent download. On IIS 7.0 and beyond, FastCGI functionality is provided by IIS FastCGI module which comes with the operating system.