Kanwaljeet Singla

My favorite motivational quotes

Kanwaljeet Singla — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 06:16:18 +0000

I have been keeping a list of quotes which I read once in a while to motivate myself and to push myself to do the right things instead of doing things which are convenient. These has been a great source of inspiration for me. So instead of maintaining the list in my drafts, I decided [...]

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. Many customers [...]

Using windows live as SMTP relay server

Kanwaljeet Singla — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 20:45:17 +0000

Today I started writing a program to notify me when IP assigned to my router by my broadband provider changes. I wanted this program to check IP address of the router every few minutes and send me email if it detects that IP is changed. For sending email, I used System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient which requires a smtp host. Instead of running a smtp server on my machine, I started looking for free smtp relay servers available on the internet. I was surprised to find out that there are plenty of them available. In fact most of the popular email service providers like windows live, yahoo, gmail offer smtp relay services.

WaitForAllObjects to wait on more than MAXIMUM_WAIT_OBJECTS handles

Kanwaljeet Singla — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 05:23:34 +0000

One of the painful limitations of WaitForMultipleObjects function is that you can use it to wait for a maximum of MAXIMUM_WAIT_OBJECTS number of object handles. Value of MAXIMUM_WAIT_OBJECTS is 64. If you need to wait on more than MAXIMUM_WAIT_OBJECTS handle, you can either create a separate thread to wait on MAXIMUM_WAIT_OBJECTS and then do a wait on these threads to finish. Using this method you can create 64 threads each of those can wait for 64 object handles.

Urlscan to RequestFiltering migration using MSDeploy

Kanwaljeet Singla — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:57:00 +0000

In addition to FastCGI migration provider, MSDeploy 1.0 RTW shipped with a URLScan to request filtering migration provider to ease migration of UrlScan.ini settings to system.webServer/security/requestFiltering section. Even though URLScan 3.1 is supported on Win2K8 and you are not required to move to request filtering module, there are few advantages in using request filtering module. One advantage is that all your configuration can stay together in applicationHost.config and web.config and you are not required to maintain a separate configuration file.

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.

How WinCache make PHP run faster

Kanwaljeet Singla — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 08:03:00 +0000

Why WinCache?

Use of PHP accelerators is very common to make PHP run faster. Most of the existing PHP accelerators which are in use today are designed keeping *nix architecture in mind and mostly doesn’t work well on Windows. For example, APC which is very commonly used on *nix doesn’t work on Windows.

Getting both FastCGI module and AppPool CPULimit to work

Kanwaljeet Singla — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 05:29:00 +0000

FastCGI module available in IIS 7.0 did not work when CPULimit for the application pool was enabled. This was because when CPULimit feature was enabled WAS uses job objects to track CPU usage of worker processes. WAS keeps a job object for each application pool and all worker processes which belong to that application pool are made part of that job object. FastCGI module uses job objects to make sure that there are no orphan child processes left when worker process goes away. Note that FastCGI requires a per process job object while WAS requires a per application pool job object. For this reason, it was not possible to make WAS take care of killing FastCGI child processes when worker process dies.