Yes, it’s official, PHP 5.2.1 is now available for download as per this article at mvolo.com.
What’s so exciting about 5.2.1?
Performance, BABY! Microsoft has been working with Zend to make PHP “rock solid” on Windows as well as working on a new FastCGI implementation.
From Mike’s blog:
You will also notice that the PHP 5.2.1 release contains an additional set of Windows binaries labelled “non-thread-safe”. These binaries are compiled without thread safety, which provides an additional performance boost for PHP when running in single-threaded envrionments like CGI and FastCGI. Be sure to download these binaries and try them out with the IIS FastCGI TP2.
What’s this mean for me and you? Well we’re running FastCGI today on our free IIS7 beta servers where you’ll be able to take advantage of this. In the next few days we should have 5.2.1 deployed to the shared servers. We’re holding off a bit longer to deploy FastCGI on the production servers but it hopefully shouldn’t be much longer before it’s ready for production.
You can download PHP 5.2.1 from php.net here: http://www.php.net/downloads
