Comments on: WinCache Extension 1.0 for PHP – Release to Web

By: ruslany

ruslany — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:17:03 +0000

@Will: It is expected that after enabling WinCache it may be necessary to increase maxInstances setting in FastCGI. This article explains why. If after increasing the number of instances you still see only 70% CPU usage under maximum load then you can try increasing the number even more.

By: Will

Will — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:48:49 +0000

Thanks for the quick reply.

I am using WinCache now and its the best ive seen. I had used APC and eaccelerator for some time, but they were very unstable on Windows/Apache.

Before WinCache, i had output caching on for all of my WordPress/php websites, but honestly i never saw any performance improvement.

Do you have any suggestions for tweaking WinCache? I noticed that I had to greatly increase the # of instances of fast-cgi with WinCache enabled. It was set to 4 and now is set to 15. Ive still not seen over 70% cpu usage.

Cheers

By: ruslany

ruslany — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 03:14:08 +0000

@Will: IIS Output Cache is used to cache the response produced by the web application so that next time a request comes for the same page, the web application code is not even invoked. For some dynamic web applications that is acceptable, but for others it may be not. For example on my blog I have a post views counter that updates the database table everytime a post or a page is requested. If I used IIS output cache, then this counter would not work, because the request would never reach the PHP code that updates the database.

WinCache is a PHP opcode cache, which caches the compiled PHP code in memory so that next time a request comes for a page, the code is not recompiled but instead is just fetched from memory. The code will be still executed for every request. In my blog case that means that the post views counter will be updated on every page request.

You can use both caches at the same time. But usually, if you are fine with limitations of opcode cache and decide to enable it, then there is no need to use opcode cache. It will not matter how fast PHP scripts execute because requests will be served from IIS output cache anyway.

By: Will

Will — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 03:01:08 +0000

How does this affect the use of Output Caching in IIS7? Is this a replacement or can I use both to help reduce server load?

I suppose I’m just confused about what exactly Output Caching in IIS7 does.

Cheers

By: Ivo

Ivo — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:14:17 +0000

we’ve run some benchmarks on WinCache and the results look very promising:

http://techportal.ibuildings.com/2009/11/19/php-on-windows-the-wincache-1-0-benchmark/

great work Ruslan!

By: Tweets that mention WinCache Extension 1.0 for PHP – Release to Web | RuslanY Blog -- Topsy.com

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:04:56 +0000

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ruslan Yakushev, kjsingla. kjsingla said: Changes made to WinCache between RC and RTW release. http://tinyurl.com/yjgavyu [...]