Kanwaljeet Singla's Blog

I spend lot of time profiling popular PHP applications finding where exactly processing time is spent during PHP execution. Few months ago, one thing which caught my attention was performance of mysql_connect API. On my windows test bench, xdebug output showed that one call to mysql_connect was taking 0.31 seconds which is huge. While playing with the API, I noticed that when IP address of the MySQL machine is used instead of the hostname, performance of mysql_connect API is much better. Read more ...

View the original post

Last week I was in Chicago in the company of very passionate and smart PHP programmers at Tek-X. I got to meet some well-known members of PHP community and also fellow Microsoft employees who have been working on improving PHP experience of Windows. I would admit that meeting people was the best part of Tek-X for me. Sessions were great too and I learnt a great deal from them. I returned to Seattle more knowledgeable and passionate for PHP then ever. One of the things I wanted to get from Tek-X was a list of problems PHP users face on Windows so that we can work on solving them. Read more ...

View the original post

I have seen many people built some innovative solutions on top of hostable web core (HWC) functionality which was added in IIS7. One of the questions which HWC users frequently ask is how to make IIS configuration tools (like appcmd, UI etc.) work against configuration file which their HWC instance is using. So far they have been either doing manual modifications to HWC configuration file or making changes to IIS configuration and then porting over to HWC configuration. Read more ...

View the original post

Ruslan (http://ruslany.net), who is Program Manager for WinCache project, has been showing WinCache statistics on the right sidebar of his website for quite some time. Few weeks ago I decided to do the same but instead of editing theme source code and add the information there, I decided to write a standalone wordpress widget. Two days ago I finally wrote the widget which is aptly called wincache-stats. It shows statistics in a table format. First column of the table show cache type and number of entries in cache, second column show hit count and hit ratio and third column show miss count and miss ratio. It can be see in action on http://www.ksingla.net. Read more ...

View the original post

In the last few years VC++ team have done some awesome work with profile guided optimizations (PGO). PGO improves performance of certain code paths which are more likely to be used in production environments. Most of the teams in Microsoft have been using this technology to speed up most commonly used scenarios. One of the ideas initially floated by Garrett was to start using PGO for building PHP. Garrett wrote a blog on how to produce a PGO build but the steps involved were little complex. I started looking into simplifying the process and came up with a simpler way. I am going to walk you through the steps I used in this blog. All the steps written in this blog are tested to work with VC9 compiler. Read more ...

View the original post

Last week I published winbuild.bat to setup PHP build environment on windows. In this blog I am covering how to add a PECL extension to the PHP build system. I will also show how to static link a PHP extension and how much performance benefit you can get by that. Read more...

View the original post

One of the things I have done many times in the past year is setting up a build environment for PHP on Windows. I have been using a simple script to do this which I am releasing today with this blog. Here is the zip file contains the script winbuild.bat along with essential tools (wget and unzip) which the script requires. Before you run winbuild.bat, make sure Visual Studio (or VC9 expression edition) and TortoiseSVN are installed on the machine. Read more ...

View the original post

One of the major pain points in FastCGI 1.0 was that users were required to set maxInstances to a number which works best for their application. Many users didn’t tune this value and were running FastCGI with default value of maxInstances which didn’t give them optimal performance. We recommended users to set maxInstances to (10 * number of processors) if they don’t want to go through the pain of finding the ideal maxInstances for them which worked much better than default value but still didn’t give optimal performance. Even when users fine-tuned maxInstances to ideal value, they didn’t always get best possible performance at all times due to variations in traffic, server/application configuration changes and code changes. Read more ...

View the original post