As a Windows user and a former trainer on ASP and IIS, I have always wanted to build high performance PHP applications running IIS. Although I use Apache and Linux all the time, some of our customers are more comfortable with Windows and IIS. [...] Fortunately there is an alternative open technology called FastCGI.

In this new article from PHPEverywhere, there's a new alternative to running PHP as an independent CGI, and, instead, work inside a "process manager" application. This saves the need for reparsing the php.ini each and every time the PHP CGI is run, shaving seconds off the overall execution times.

It looks like a good system for Windows users out there, especially those that are looking for a perfomance boost for those CGI-based applications. AAnd, according to this piece: performance improved by 766% when using FastCGI. This is consistent with Shane's findings. A stress test with 10,000 requests worked fine with no memory leaks.