Howdy,
I've been working for many months with Pierre Joye - well, really many people in the PHP community - on getting PHP to run faster on Windows.
Pierre has been working rapidly on upgrading libraries (Pierre pioneered the work to get PHP and its hoard of dependent libraries updated and properly compiling on Windows), replacing old POSIX-emulation code with native calls, patching bugs, and about a million other things, all of which had a huge impact on performance and stability of PHP on Windows.
For my part, I've been spending my time behind the scenes by feeding information to Pierre that he needs, testing, analyzing, and finally by constructing a new build process that enables us to take advantage of some pretty sweet optimization technology in Visual Studio.
Starting today, you can find snapshot builds of PHP 5.3 that are built using my optimized build process on the windows.php.net site.
A few notes:
Over the course of the next couple of weeks, I'll be explaining how this build process works, and making available the tools that make it all possible.
Only the non-thread-safe version is available, so you need to use FastCGI with IIS in order to use it.
Since this is a radically different build than the ones that had been traditionally used to create the Windows PHP binaries, you should download the binaries and test with them, but you probably should avoid using them in production just yet.
If you have any feedback about the builds, leave me a comment, or email me.