PHP on Windows and what’s happening

I blogged earlier about the great work the Microsoft Team was doing with the Zend team to get PHP running better on Windows. I can definitely say it’s made a difference. Some of our clients run really large PHP sites or bulletin boards (in fact this blog is running on PHP 5.2.1 on Windows).  In today’s Zend newsletter they mentioned an article in Redmond Developer News: Zend Boosts PHP on Windows.

My favorite quote from the article is:

“[A] lot of PHP development happens on Windows,” says Mark de Visser, Zend’s chief marketing officer. “However, most deployment happens on Linux. Why? Because PHP just doesn’t run very well on Windows. That was something that Microsoft didn’t like and that we saw as a problem. So, we got together with the aim of making sure that PHP had equal performance on Windows as it has on Linux and Unix.”

Followed by:

Zend is claiming improved Windows performance of between 200 percent and 300 percent overall with Zend Core 2.0.

These improvements were ofcourse returned to community in the release of PHP 5.2.1 which is running on all of our php ready windows shared hosting servers.