Following the release of the 1.0 stable version of Microsoft's WinCache accelerator, Ivo Jansch took the opportunity to run some benchmarks to see the response times of two applications, WordPress and SilverStripe, on a standard Windows hosting setup.

While it's important to realise that benchmarks have their drawbacks, they are very useful to make relative comparisons, and that is exactly what we will be doing in this article. The benchmarks were carried out by Mark van der Velden, one of our PHP on Windows platform specialists. I'm going to describe his setup in a minute, but for those unfamiliar with the concept of acceleration, I'd like to point to this Wikipedia article which is a good primer on how PHP accelerators work and why you should use one.

They used two servers with the same hardware specs and a the following software: WordPress & SilverStripe, the Web Platform Installer (Microsoft) and Zend Server. Check out the rest of the post for the results of their testing.