IIS Aid

Hi AJ,

Welcome to my forums :). Short answer is yes. I hope to have update the IIS Aid PHP Installer in the next week or two, and among the changes will be an update to PHP 4.4.6 and a change from APC to eAccelerator. I can certainly help you configure eAccelerator if you like, but just keep in mind that doing this is like buying cloths for people. Everyone is a different size and have different needs. By nature all opcode caches are memory bound, so if you are hosting on a server with limited available memory and a lot of PHP scripts then you will to take that into account. It becomes a bit of a juggling act, but more often than not can be done very effectively.

As for the MS FastCGI preview 2, I think it is still a bit too early to be putting it in production use. It looks amazingly promising (have a read of my interview articles) but I wouldn't be going there yet for production use. The FastCGI module written by Shane Caraveo is very solid under PHP4 and has been around for 5 years now to have a lot of bugs and kinks worked out. That said, it does have limitations the biggest one of which its settings are applied per application pool. This is really only an issue for web host providers (which is why they are all so excited bout the MS FastCGI development), but for standard environments on a VPS or dedicated server it is generally a really good option.

Hi AJ,

A few questions for you;

What is your available memory at peak times?

How many Application pools do your servers run?

What is the total size of all your cachable scripts (everything that ends in .php, .inc, etc)?

If you can, also find out the total size of all your most frequently used cachable scripts.

How many concurrent requests will your servers deal with at peak times?

Hi AJ,

If all your PHP scripts reside in structured directories, you could use something like TreeSize from JamSoftware. By the sounds of it I don't think it will be an issue. You can find out how much available memory you have using performance monitor or by using task manager. If your servers have 4GB and run IIS 6 and not much else then we should be fine.

FastCGI does have some registry settings, but the current version of the IIS Aid PHP Installer allows you to configure these as a part of the install process. As you have a lot of memory and only one application pool I would set StartServers at around 10, IncrementServers to somewhere between 2 and 5, and MaxServers to around 25. I'd suggest leaving the Timeout value to the default of 600 unless you have specific need to change it.

Once you have PHP installed you can check your configuration by placing the following code in a file called info.php (anything you want really, so long as it ends in .php) and placing it inside the root of your website;

<br />
<?<br />
phpinfo();<br />
?><br />

Now when you goto yourdomain.com/info.php you should be presented with a page detailing your PHP environment settings. The other way of course is to browse to the "IIS-Aid.com PHP Installer" under "All Programs" in the start menu and select the "PHP Info" item.

Now I have a few more questions for you :).

1) Will you be installing the IIS Aid PHP Installer on a development server first? Reason being that the current version is the first beta, and I have identified a few bugs in it. Nothing critical, but just a few things I'd need to work through with you. These obviously will be fixed in the next version.

2) Do you mind me asking where you found out about my site and the IIS Aid PHP installer?

At the moment you have specified EA to use 0 MB of memory, have compression turned off and haven't set where to store the cache (which will mean it'll be using memory and disk). See if these make a difference, and then use the phpinfo(); function to view your PHP environment and verify that EA is being loaded.

eaccelerator.check_mtime 1
eaccelerator.compress 1
eaccelerator.compress_level 9
eaccelerator.content shm
eaccelerator.keys shm
eaccelerator.optimizer 1
eaccelerator.sessions shm
eaccelerator.shm_max 0
eaccelerator.shm_only 1
eaccelerator.shm_prune_period 0
eaccelerator.shm_size 32
eaccelerator.shm_ttl 0

Also keep in mind that EA is compatible with Zend Optimiser which APC and Xcache are not. That won't do a great deal, but could possibly help out as well.