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Saturday, January 24, 2009

FastCGI Extension by Microsoft to run PHP on IIS

TAGs: IIS, FastCGI, PHP

Microsoft has recently made FastCGI Extension available for download from its downloads site, that will enable IIS to run scripting languages other than asp.net, for example PHP.

As described by Microsoft

Brief Description
The FastCGI Extension for Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 and 5.1 enables popular application frameworks (such as PHP) to be hosted on the IIS web server in a high-performance and reliable way.


The FastCGI Extension for IIS 6.0 and 5.1 enables popular application frameworks that support FastCGI protocol to be hosted on the IIS web server in a high-performance and reliable way. FastCGI provides a high-performance alternative to the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), a standard way of interfacing external applications with Web servers that has been supported as part of the IIS feature-set since the very first release.

CGI programs are executables launched by the web server for each request in order to process the request and generate dynamic responses that are sent back to the client. Because many of these frameworks do not support multi-threaded execution, CGI enables them to execute reliably on IIS by executing exactly one request per process. Unfortunately, it provides poor performance due to the high cost of starting and shutting down a process for each request.

FastCGI addresses the performance issues inherent to CGI by providing a mechanism to reuse a single process over and over again for many requests. Additionally, FastCGI maintains compatibility with non-thread-safe libraries by providing a pool of reusable processes and ensuring that each process will only handle one request at a time.


An important note for running FastCGI, that IIS 6.0 or 5.1 must be enabled on the operating system in order to be able to use FastCGI Extension. There is another FastCGI extension to make APACHE handle the desiered file extensions by FastCGI.

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Chicago, IL, United States
Creativity enthusiast ... Worked as web based application developer for more than 10 years using cgi, asp, php, asp.net server scripting languages in addition to JavaScript and recently glowing frameworks such as prototype, scriptaculous, jquery, mootools.. working on enhancing managerial skills and looking forward for a good position ;)