Final RTW version of WINCACHE 1.0 released

Thursday, November 19, 2009

I am extremely proud to announce that we have released the final RTW version of WINCACHE 1.0. Please look at the forum announcement of the same at http://forums.iis.net/p/1162808/1925444.aspx#1925444 which contains all the details about the release. I would strongly recommend everyone running Beta/RC version of WINCACHE 1.0 to upgrade to the final RTW release. If you installed WINCACHE 1.0 RC from Microsoft Web Platform Installer, you can use the same to upgrade to RTW. Upgrade from RC to RTW is supported through WPI. If you have installed WINCACHE 1.0 RC/Beta manually, you will need to install the new binaries manually. Here are the steps:

Download appropriate bits from http://windows.php.net/downloads/pecl/wincache/

If you are running PHP 5.2.* you will need to download 'wincache52.exe'
If you are running PHP 5.3.* you will need to download 'wincache53.exe'

Run the executable from the saved location. If you are on Vista+ OS, I would advise you to run the executable as an administrator. Right click on the executable and click 'Run as administrator' button as shown below:

If you are prompted with UAC dialog, click 'Yes' to proceed.
Accept the license agreement.
Extract the files to choice of your location.
The folder will contain 4 files as shown below:

If your server is running, please stop it before you continue copying files.
Replace the old 'php_wincache.dll' with the new one.
Replace the old 'wincache.php' with the new one.
Start the server.

There are some good enhancements in this release. The 'wincache.php' file has been enhanced to support:

A brand new chart showing the state of cache memory consumption
Supports all different kind of IIS authentication
List of files displayed now in sorted order

There has been many critical bug fixes in the DLL itself. There were people who reported crashes and that to random crashes in WINCACHE DLL. All these crashes were happening because of the scavenging logic. WINCACHE on every request checks if there are stale files which need to be removed. There has been nasty bugs in this code path which has been fixed. If you are seeing WINCACHE crashing in event viewer or otherwise, most likely cause was scavenger not working properly. We believe the final RTW release will have all these issues fixed.

We have also addressed a situation where WINCACHE was making PHP bail out. This was happening because exception were not being handled properly from the extension. A detailed release notes can be found here.

WINCACHE is now also an open source from this release under BSD license. Extension source code can be found at http://pecl.php.net/package/WinCache. All the documentation about WINCACHE can be found at http://us3.php.net/wincache/. If you are having problem running WINCACHE please visit our forum at http://forums.iis.net/1164.aspx. If you have found a bug, you can report it at http://pecl.php.net/bugs/report.php?package=WinCache. We will be more than glad to help you.

In case you are interested in some performance benchmark regarding how WINCACHE competes with some of other available caching solution on Windows, here are the links (They are all published by our users/customers):

It has been a lot of hard work and sweat in the past 6-7 months when we started this project and now that we are done with version 1.0. I hope you all will like this. I would personally like to thank all of you for helping across different milestones in finding bugs, requesting feature enhancement and doing all little things which matter to us.

And yes, there is a future for WINCACHE and we are going to start working on V2 soon. We are totally committed here to make PHP work the best on IIS. So do drop all your ideas/suggestion and we would love to incorporate those in early stages.

Hopefully this release will help you running PHP on IIS faster. Thanks for patient reading and good bye.

Don.

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