I have not heard of Dolphin CMS, but based on your explaination I would not be surprised that it loads the CPU up to 100% on your server.

The first thing I would try is to set the FastCGI MaxInstances setting to some constant value other than 0. That way you will have one less variable to worry about when you analyze the load on the server. You said you had it set to 4 before. What was the CPU load then?

What is the behavior you are getting on your site right now when it is under load? Do you see requests dropped? Or is it just slow?

When you check the wincache.php stats, how many files do you see cached by WinCache?

I’ve been reading your work on PHP and IIS for a long time and you helped me out with some wordpress stuff before. I have an issue where one of my clients is running Dolphin 7.0.4 with Ray Media server on my Windows 2008 R2 machine and it is a real mess.

If you haven’t worked with or heard of Dolphin it’s a bloated CMS with lots of Social Plugins, Chat, and Video uploads built in PHP it’s very Linux and Apache focused so the forums aren’t all that great for developing on Windows. The problem is that the php-cgi.exe processes keep spawning out of control, at some times during busy traffic I get 60 processes going at once. So my server was constantly at 100% CPU usage.

I have PHP 5.3 and WinCache 1.1 working on the my server and I adjusted my FastCGI settings to allow more exeuction time. That helped but it’s still really high usage. I have log files for the last few weeks and each day’s log file is over 1.5 GB. It’s nutty, the site shows 30 to 50 unique visitors per hour and it has over 1200 members now in it’s third week. But it’s reall resource intesive and I can’t run my other sites that are on that server.

I have the logs, screen shots of my FastCGI settings, and the screen shots of my WinCache output file. One thing that is not operating for Wincahce is the UserCache because I don’t know how to set it up for this CMS. Also on the Dolphin forums has the mindset of code that is very much spageghti code and letting unknowledgeable non-IT people run a mock with it. Whenever you get to knowledgeable people, they almost always have a Linux Apache expertise and I don’t know about Windows mindset. So it’s very frustrating.

So I figured you’d be a good person to ask for help, I’m willing to follow up on any instructions you give me I ahve a good deal of data about the site, logs, and specs, also Google Analytics on the traffic – I’m just lost as to where to begin on this or how to go about finding out where to look for answers as to where the problem is with such high CPU usage and multiple php-cgi.exe processes. I also set the Max instances to 0 in the FastCGI settings I had it at 4 before, my CPU is a Xeon Quad core so it has 4 cores. I also figure this would a be a good project for you to gain insight to which I can help you with and you can post about it in regard to PHP and Windows because Dolphin has a strong following in LAMP circles, ones that like bloat CMS with Video and all that at least. If we can figure out a way to get this to scale and perform well on Windows with the Ray Media server, that would be a major achievement as far as being able to provide documentation about that, because I’ve looked all over and can’t find any such documentation.

Anyway, let me know if you want to help me and I’ll send you a Contact message to see if we can follow up with an email.

Thanks,

Rafael

I’d looked into a way around that perplexing 30 second delay back in April/May but didn’t run across what was actually causing it. Have been gritting my teeth about it when debugging on the dev platform ever since.

Searched again and there was the information you’d posted, front and center.

1.1 works like a charm. Sweet.

Thanks again — future work on this platform is looking far more efficient from here on out.

What does phpinfo show for wincache.ocenabled and wincache.fcenabled settings? They should be both set to 1.

Is there something else I should be doing to have the extension do its thing?

Thanks in advance.