The latest issue of the Web & PHP Magazine has been published - Issue #7, "Full Throttle". Articles included in this issue are:

• Introduction into scaling for Big Data: Cory Isaacson's new column
• What can developers learn from the road? - By Arne Blankerts
• How to be an open source rockstar in 7 easy steps - By Jen Kramer
• PHP security for the real world - By Michael Stowe
• Developing Web Applications in Haskell - By Patrick Brisbin
• Speed up your applications using IIS & WinCache - By Arno Hollosi

You can download this latest issue for free as a PDF as well as picking up the past 6 issues with some great PHP-related content inside.

Brian Swan has a new post to his blog sharing some tips you can use to get the best performance out of your Windows applications by tuning Wincache.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post that showed how to improve the performance of PHP applications on Windows by using the IIS output caching module. Using the output caching module can have significant positive impact on application performance since pages are served from cache without executing any PHP code. However, this very strength can also be a drawback depending on how your application is built. Because entire pages are cached, using output caching may not be ideal for pages that have multiple data sources.

He points to the Wincache extension as an alternative to the full-page caching with it's built-in opcode caching (you get for "free" just by installing). He mentions this and a few other features that come with it like the ability to cache to a file and to normalize file paths for more efficient seeking of files. He also focuses on partial caching with a specific example of caching user data for use through out the application. A bit of code and some screenshots are included to show the performance boost this can give.

Brian Swan has posted a new timeline to his MSDN blog today about the road that Microsoft has traveled with PHP to get to where they are today.

This morning I came across this article on PHPDeveloper.org: Blast from the Past – One Year Ago in PHP. That brief look into the past got me to thinking about what Microsoft has done lately toward PHP interoperability. (By "lately", I mean in the last few years.) And, I’ve been working on a presentation for TechEd in Berlin next month that will, in part, provide a brief overview of Microsoft’s efforts toward PHP interoperability and support. So, I thought I’d share a bit of that summary here

The timeline runs from back in 2006 when PHP and Windows/IIS/SQL Server just wasn't much of an option through the FastCGI and SQL Server driver years and finally rounding out with WinCache, PHP 5.3 improvements for Windows and the Azure SDK for PHP.

Josh Holmes, just coming off of presenting at OpenCa.mp in Dallas, has posted his entire presentation to his blog for anyone that missed it and wants to catch up. He spoke about scaling WordPress on the Windows platform. He also includes a lot of content in the post that he wasn't able to get to during the presentation.

Now, on to my session itself. This was a fun session. I only had 30 minutes and I had about 3 hours of material so I've got a ton of stuff in these notes that I didn't cover in the session itself. The session is a take off a session that I did at MODxpo back in the spring. The talk itself is about 3-5 minutes of slides and the rest is all demos.

If you're looking for the actual slides, they're over on slideshare, but the real content - including the demos (and screenshots of them) are included. He talks about the Windows Platform Installer, the WinCache library and Windows Azure Data Storage.

Ruslan Yakushev has a new post to his blog today with details on the latest release of the WinCache caching tool from Microsoft, version 1.1.

Today IIS team has published the final release of WinCache Extension 1.1 for PHP. This is the latest stable and production ready version of the extension. The v1.1 has all the features available in version 1.0 plus [other] features.

These other features include:

• user cache APIs that can directly be used by PHP applications
• a WinCache session handler
• file change notifications (faster update time for opcode/file caches)
• lock and unlock API interfaces.

He also includes a brief look at how to get it installed and working with your PHP applications, getting access to the source for the project and some places to get help with using it, on the extension itself and to report a bug that you might have found.

Don Raman has a new post to his IIS blog today with a quick bit of information that Joomla users could use to get better performance with WinCache, integrated directly into the CMS's caching system.

Now that we have WINCACHE 1.1 Beta released which has got implementation for both user and session cache, one can easily take advantage of WINCACHE user cache and increase performance of Joomla. In this post I am going to tell you steps to use WINCACHE user cache with Joomla.

There's a class you'll need to copy and paste to create a new Joomla caching component, but after that it's as easy as having the WinCache tool installed and changing your configuration options to use the new wincache connector class for the CMS's caching.

Here's a direct link to grab this latest version of WinCache since it only works with version 1.1.0 and higher - WinCache.zip.

Christian Flickinger has written up a new blog post today showing some of the benchmarks he's worked up around the performance of various caching tools with the WinCache caching tool from Microsoft coming out as a leader.

The [WinCache] documentation makes no mention of Apache, only IIS. I decided to give it a try, and to my amazement, WinCache worked in Apache on Windows. After that I decided to compare the performance of WinCache with the other available options for Windows+Apache.

He defines his testing environment - hardware, software and the different opcode caching tools - and includes his testing technique. His results, measured in requests per second, are interesting but show that, for his configuration, the WinCache tool's performance topped the others on Windows.

Both Don Raman and Ruslan Yakushev have posted about the latest release of the WinCache caching tool from Microsoft for Windows-based PHP installations.

Don comments:

Based on the user's feedback (which was all positive) we decided to release WINCACHE 1.0.1 today. I would advise everybody using WINCACHE to switch to the new stable version even if you are not seeing any problem with current builds. This version has got a critical fix and is good enough reason to upgrade to the newer bits.

Fixes in this release include problems with require_once, some pathing problems, a few changes to the wincache.php file and a few other smaller changes to help with the overall stability. You can download this latest release from the project's SourceForge page. However, if you want a thread-safe version, you'll need to compile it yourself.

On his IIS.net blog Don Raman is asking for help in testing Microsoft's WinCache caching tool because of a critical fix they had to make to the current version.

There has been several instances where people using WINCACHE have reported problem while running it on the actual production server. They have complained that WINCACHE works very well on development server but the users can see a crash (or different symptoms of it) while actually deploying it on a live production server.

There have been several reports of the issue where the site visitor gets an empty page back and WinCache will crash. For those wanting to get into the technical details, the post includes them or, if you just want to find out more about the bug, there's a few email addresses you can contact the WinCache team at.

On the Windows IIS blog today Don Raman looks at debugging WinCache (the Windows caching tool with hooks into PHP) with Visual Studio - Basic in the FastCGI version on IIS.

I am planning to write a series of blog post which will be helpful in debugging WINCACHE. This is just the beginning. So please be patient and forgive me if some of the posts sound for novice user. All my post will assume that you are debugging PHP CGI running under IIS using FastCGI. This means using the non thread safe version of PHP/WINCACHE and IIS running PHP files successfully. I believe the same can be applied to thread safe version of WINCACHE/PHP running under Apache but I do not guarantee that.

He mentions his build environment, what you'll need as far as software to debug and the WinCache source to build from. He includes brief instructions on building WinCache (vis Visual Studio) and how to set up the debugging for the PHP CGI. You can then attach the debugger in Visual Studio to the CGI instance and keep a watchful eye on it. You could also use the Windows Debugging Tools to do most of the same work.