The much-anticipated PHP 5.2.1 has just been released, and is available for download from http://www.php.net/downloads.

This release contains many fixes Zend has contributed to improve the performance of the PHP scripting engine on Windows as part of our collaboration effort to make PHP rock on Windows / IIS.  This comes almost at the same time as our release of IIS FastCGI Tech Preview 2 last week.  It also contains a number of functionality fixes, such as for PHP imprersonation when in FastCGI mode.

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.

Also, look for some performance analysis in the next post ...