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PHP runs up to 130% faster on Windows Server 2008

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Some might say this is a pretty outlandish statement to make, but we recently did some work with a local customer by the name of Virtual Maps that developed and maintains local Singaporean travel portal StreetDirectory.com, to test their popular web applications in Windows Server 2008.

The built-in support of FastCGI enables PHP applications to run efficiently on Windows Server 2008, with significant performance boosts. As can be seen in the graph from the case study;

 

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This graph shows the tremendous performance increase realised by Virtual Maps by hosting their PHP applications on Windows Server 2008.

Some observant people might say that at the 4000 user point the performance of Linux is better, and I asked my colleague Dennis on this, and he said that in most companies situations they will evaluate the performance and look at the range at where 75% of the maximum number of hits are attained, and scale out from there.

If we took this same approach to the numbers here, then most users would be scaling out to another machine at about 45,000 sustained hits, whereas on the Linux box it would be around 30,000 sustained hits.

The great thing about this was that these results were realised on Windows Server 2008 Core Server completely out of the box with no performance tweaks at all.

So what does all this mean for Virtual Maps, what are the benefits apart from making their application able to sustain more hits per server?

Well if Virtual Maps are able to sustain a greater number of hits per server, it essentially means that they need less servers to meet the customer demands. Less servers means they have an opportunity for server consolidation which means they can reduce the number of servers they need to support and maintain.

While we have not go this published on an official page as of yet, I will host this on my Windows Live Sky Drive, so you can download the report here. If anyone has any issues accessing it, please ping me and I can get something fixed up.