Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Garrett Serack, Windows Server

PHP 5.3 RC2 Highly Optimized for Windows

Garrett Serack — Mon, 11 May 2009 16:52:00 GMT

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.

The Apache Visit to Microsoft Campus: Day Two

Garrett Serack — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 22:59:00 GMT

The Apache Visit to Microsoft Campus: Day Two

Day two turned out to be quite a busy day!

First thing in the morning, we started off testing some Apache applications on Windows Server 2008, both the 64 and 32 bit versions. Right away, a few things were uncovered, primarily around UAC, data redirection (where Windows redirects writes to the file system and registry to safe locations for low-rights processes) and an odd issue with an event mutex that we're tracking down.

After getting a little testing done, we had a great in-depth presentation of IIS by Senior Program Manager Thomas Deml. Like the Core Networking presentation the day before, it was really informative, and the Apache folks took the opportunity to really drill down into the architecture of IIS. Why would they? Like I mentioned before, a number of Apache Projects (like Tomcat) support IIS in one way or another, and could benefit from tighter integration with IIS.

After lunch, Peter-Michael Osera and Li Shao spent a couple of hours addressing some of the C++ and toolset questions the Apache team brought. They really did an admirable job answering the questions that they could, and the ones that they didn't have answers to, they are following up via email over the next couple of days.

After that, some more time for testing rounded out the rest of the day.

For supper, Sam Ramji, took the team out to Ruths' Chris Steakhouse for a fantastic meal, and we had a great evening talking about nearly everything under the sun.

The Apache Visit to Microsoft Campus: Day One

Garrett Serack — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:34:00 GMT

This morning, we've had the honor of hosting the Apache Software Foundation in the Windows Server 2008 Application Labs. They are here this week in order to get some deep knowledge about Windows Server 2008, and access to the folks from product groups who can help them make their apps work better under Windows Server.

We asked them out to campus because we are extremely interested in having the Apache web server (well, all the Apache projects) run great on Windows Server 2008. Now, every time I say that, some folks always want to know "Why would you want that?" or "What do the IIS folks think about that?"

Well, it turns out that some folks have apps that run on Apache. Yes, even on Windows. Sometimes, it's a matter of investment in a particular solution where their app uses Apache. It could even be that they just simply prefer the model that Apache provides. Regardless, it's important to us that those applications run as good as they possibly can on the Windows platform.

As to the question about IIS, there are several Apache projects like Tomcat that currently support IIS, and hey, we'd like to have even better support. To make that happen, we've asked some folks from the IIS team to join us in the labs, where they can open up and give the assistance that is needed.

By midday, two fine gentlemen from the Compatibility Lab (Pat Altimore and Maarten Van De Bospoort) presented a great session about general compatibility issues with Windows Server 2008.

In the afternoon, we had Ari Pernick (along with a posse of extremely knowledgeable folks, whose names I did not get... but I will) come out from the Core Networking group. They spent about two and a half hours going through details in the Windows Server 2008 networking stack, as well as a deep investigation of the HTTP.SYS technology. Now, I’m no slouch when it comes to this stuff, but I tell ya, I learned a lot yesterday just sitting in on that. From the water-cooler conversations that we had later in afternoon, I would expect that we’re going to see some interesting changes in Apache httpd, and Tomcat in the future.

After that, we took an hour and came up with a list of other issues and questions that the Apache folks had, so we can drag in some more product groups on Tuesday and Wednesday.

As for the evening, we all went out to the Rock Bottom Brewery for some food and drinks and some socialization—I took a few pictures, and I’ll get them up as soon as I can.