Since the time this article has been written the WP Super Cache plugin has changed a lot. I cannot guarantee at this point that the instructions below will work. Note that new caching plugins have been developed that support IIS better. I recommend to try out W3 Total Cache plugin which has support for IIS and WinCache.
The performance of WordPress may be sufficient for an average blog that gets a few page hits per minute. However, if your blog post suddenly shows up on digg.com or any other social networking site, it may become challenging for server to handle such huge spike in traffic. A few options exist to help server to cope with flood of requests:
- IIS Output Caching
- WP Cache plugin for WordPress
- WP Super Cache plugin for WordPress
In this post I will explain the benefits and drawbacks of each option and walk through the steps for configuring IIS and WordPress to use those options. Continue Reading »
ruslany on December 23rd 2008 in PHP, WordPress
13,728 views
The information in this post is not applicable anymore because the update that fixes the custom errors problem in IIS 7.0 FastCGI module has been made available . Read the release announcement to get more details about the update.
Recently, I found out that my WordPress powered blog did not correctly handle 404 – File Not Found errors. When a request was made to a non-existent page, then instead of getting nice WordPress based error page, visitors used to get a generic IIS 7.0 404 error page. Somehow, I have missed that part of the configuration when I set up WordPress initially. The fix for that turned out to be very simple, but since it seems to be a very common configuration task when hosting WordPress on IIS 7.0, I decided to explain the necessary configuration steps.
Continue Reading »
ruslany on December 5th 2008 in PHP, WordPress
7,049 views
IIS team has recently released an update for IIS 7.0 FastCGI module that fixes compatibility problems with several popular PHP applications. In particular, the update changes the behavior of FastCGI module in the following ways:
- REQUEST_URI server variable set by FastCGI module now includes query string and path info. Previously, lack of the query string in this server variable caused the popular CMS application Drupal to not work with FastCGI on IIS 7.0
- REQUEST_URI server variable now contains the originally requested URL path before any URL rewriting was performed. Prior to this fix, the server variable used to contain a final rewritten URL, which caused problems when using URL rewriting to enable “pretty permalinks” for popular blog engine WordPress.
Note that above mentioned problems do not exist in IIS 6.0 FastCGI Extension, which always has been setting the REQUEST_URI server variable correctly.
The update is available for download from the following locations:
Warning: if your PHP application was coded in a way so that it relied on the REQUEST_URI server variable to contain the requested URL without a query string or to contain the final rewritten URL, then installing this update may break your application. Before applying the update, please make sure that your application does not rely on incorrect behavior of FastCGI module.
Acknowledgements: I want to thank IIS team members (Anil Ruia, Won Yoo, Yamini Jagadeesan) for providing this update and Zend Technologies team (Stanislav Malyshev) for validating the changes in FastCGI module.
ruslany on August 26th 2008 in FastCGI, PHP, WordPress
12,985 views
(6 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)