On the P'unk Avenue blog there's a recent post from Tom Boutell looking at optimizing PHP applications and how you can cope with the possibility of "Serious Traffic" that might come your way.

PHP is easy...as programming languages go, that is. You can build sites in a real hurry. [...] Still, sooner or later success catches up with you and you want your site to cope with Serious Traffic...or cope with moderate traffic on a cheap virtual machine...or at the very least, not be dog-slow with just a handful of users on the system.

He mentions things that can slow down the application (like timeouts on web server connections or not optimizing the site with a "thin" server for non-PHP requests). He mentions the alternative PHP cache (APC) as one possible way to help, some tips on making your Apache server more efficient and pushing those lighter requests off to a smaller, built-for-speed server using FastCGI.

After putting together an example setup of how to run multiple PHP versions all on the same machine with as little hassle as possible, Christian Weiske is back with the second half - putting those multiple versions into Apache.

After showing you how to set up multiple PHP versions on a single machine, it's time to explain how to stuff all those compiled php-cgi executables into a single Apache web server instance.

The key lies in using the mod_fastcgi module for Apache rather than the usual mod_php one. Each PHP version gets its own CGI server and the versions are changed based on the virtual host names.

Christian Flickinger has written up a new blog post today showing some of the benchmarks he's worked up around the performance of various caching tools with the WinCache caching tool from Microsoft coming out as a leader.

The [WinCache] documentation makes no mention of Apache, only IIS. I decided to give it a try, and to my amazement, WinCache worked in Apache on Windows. After that I decided to compare the performance of WinCache with the other available options for Windows+Apache.

He defines his testing environment - hardware, software and the different opcode caching tools - and includes his testing technique. His results, measured in requests per second, are interesting but show that, for his configuration, the WinCache tool's performance topped the others on Windows.

Brian Swan has posted a new guide to his blog today to help you get started with PHP on Windows the easy way - with the help of the Windows Platform Installer (and it's compared to a manual install too).

I started working on some of the posts that I've promised, but I quickly realized I should cover the basics first. So, in this post I'll cover the requirements, options, and instructions for installing PHP and configuring Internet Information Services (IIS). [...] I suggest reading through the entire post before starting to install PHP. I will cover how to use the Web Platform Installer (WPI) and how to install PHP manually.

The guide for the Web Platform Installer is really just a series of screenshots showing the menus and the options you'll need to check to get a complete install up and running including the WinCache tool and SQL Server connectivity. The details on the manual installation aren't as detailed since there's so many options that could be set up with IIS and PHP. They rely mostly on the instructions PHP.net provides to get it working on Windows with either Apache or IIS.

On the Web Developer Juice blog there's a new post that'll walk you through the installation and integration of the Apache ActiveMQ messaging service and how to integrate it with your application.

Apache ActiveMQ is one good option for implementing message queue in your PHP application. It can be easily installed on your server and it's web accessible admin interface really makes administrator's life easy. It can be easily connected with PHP via STOMP. I will suggest to use MySql for Data persistance and start ActiveMQ as unix service.

Their eleven step process includes getting the packages you'll need to run ActiveMQ, starting/stopping the service, setting up the STOMP transport connector and finally connecting it to MySQL. You can then install the PECL extension for STOMP and reload Apache to get it all working together. They even include a sample script to get you started.

Rob James has a new post looking at configuring Apache to run Tomcat and PHP together so you can have both Java and PHP apps running through the same Apache frontend.

Here is the scenario; you have a project that requires hosting a single website in a single web domain, but you have a mix of PHP applications and Java (or in my instance, GRAILS) applications that you need to run. [...] The problem is, that there is no good documentation to help you do this, so here I go!

His example sets up a site that will load static pages, run PHP applications, handle Java application requests without missing a beat. He starts from the very beginning - installing OpenSSH, vsftpd, MySQL, Apache, Java and Tomcat - all from packages on a Ubuntu linux installation. To connect Tomcat with Apache, you'll need to use the mod_proxy Apache module and configure the Tomcat server to listen on the right port.

On NETTUTS.com today there's a great new tutorial on getting a complete development environment set up with IIS, Apache, PHP, MySQL and getting them all to play nicely together.

To create the dynamic and interactive apps and sites that we've come to know and love, you need a development server. On Windows systems we really have only a few decent options available; we can use Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS), which is usually bundled with Ultimate or Business versions of Windows, or we can use Apache, the extremely popular open-source alternative

They walk you through the whole process, complete with screeshots of each application's setup, configuration files/changes, getting PHP to talk to MySQL and a sample script you can use to ensure that everything's working together.

On the Millwood Online blog there's a quick step-by-step about getting multiple Drupal sites up and running on one code installation.

One of the great things about Drupal is that you can run more that one site off one installation. This saves disk space and load on your server, it also saves maintenance time. With only one installation to manage and update the time spent administering your site drops greatly.

The process is pretty simple - install Drupal normally and set it up for the main domain, then change the directory name for the settings and add another for the new domain name. Go update your Apache virtual host configuration file to point to the new location and restart the web server. Both of your domains should be set and ready.

If you've been puzzling on how to get a custom installation of PHP, MySQL and Apache set up on your Snow Leopard (OS X) upgrade, Rob Allen has just the post you've been looking for:

With OS X 10.6, Apple ships PHP 5.3 with PEAR, GD and PDO_MYSQL out of the box. Also, everything is now 64bit. This means that the entire effort required to get a working PHP dev environment for my work is now much easier.

He walks you through the modifications needed for files in /usr/local, changes to get MySQL started, updates to the Apache configuration to get it playing nicely with the PHP5 module and changes to the php.ini and Xdebug configurations to pick up the right extensions directory.

As announced on the Zend Developer Zone today, there's a new version of the extension for PHP that lets it interface directly with a Solr instance.

The Apache Solr extension is an extremely fast, light-weight, feature-rich library that allows PHP developers to communicate easily and efficiently with Apache Solr server instances using an object-oriented API. It effectively simplifies the process of interacting with Apache Solr using PHP. The Solr extension already has built-in readiness for Solr 1.4

The post lists some of the features of the API the extension exposes (like connection reuse and a simpler interface to response data) as well as a list of supported components.