Windows based web-server recommendation

Question

Hi,

I've been searching for a way to install PHP CMS Drupal-7 and PHP ORM Library called Doctrine-2 which are hosted on my Fedora-16 (apache), to connect with my SQL Server 2005. But nothing works...

The sad thing is, both (Drupal-7 and Doctrine-2) only provide (or support) sqlsrv driver which is not available for Linux (yet?).

So I think I should move to Windows based web-server, which there are two common servers, IIS and Apache. Here, I would like suggestions which server to choose, IIS or Apache? (it's kinda IIS vs Apache things, I'm not sure though)

If there are any other suggestions, please be my guest...

The application scale is pretty big, because it will be used as an Academic support application for university (so lots of data and transaction will be involved).

Thanks.

Answer 1

Check this out: http://windows.php.net/downloads/snaps/ostc/pftt/perf/results-20120229-5.3.10-5.4.0.html

That is from windows.php.net's nightly test run. I think it's meant to compare PHP 5.3.10 perf with PHP 5.4 perf. However, you can also draw some conclusions about IIS vs. Apache on Windows. If you look at the 5.3.10 column for Drupal in both the IIS and Apache sections, you see that IIS is handling more transactions per second than Apache. Based on that, I'd recommend going with IIS.

Word of caution: Because the SQLSRV driver doesn't yet support PHP 5.4 (support is coming), I suggest going with 5.3.10 for now.

On Linux support: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brian_swan/archive/2011/10/13/microsoft-announces-sql-server-odbc-driver-for-linux.aspx ("Plans for a 32-bit version of the driver are on the roadmap", and SQLSRV is built on ODBC. :-)) Also of interest: http://blog.acjacinto.com/2011/11/compiling-php-with-mssql-servers-native.html.

Hope that helps.

-Brian

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This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_swan

Answer 2

Check this out: http://windows.php.net/downloads/snaps/ostc/pftt/perf/results-20120229-5.3.10-5.4.0.html

That is from windows.php.net's nightly test run. I think it's meant to compare PHP 5.3.10 perf with PHP 5.4 perf. However, you can also draw some conclusions about IIS vs. Apache on Windows. If you look at the 5.3.10 column for Drupal in both the IIS and Apache sections, you see that IIS is handling more transactions per second than Apache. Based on that, I'd recommend going with IIS.

Word of caution: Because the SQLSRV driver doesn't yet support PHP 5.4 (support is coming), I suggest going with 5.3.10 for now.

On Linux support: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brian_swan/archive/2011/10/13/microsoft-announces-sql-server-odbc-driver-for-linux.aspx ("Plans for a 32-bit version of the driver are on the roadmap", and SQLSRV is built on ODBC. :-)) Also of interest: http://blog.acjacinto.com/2011/11/compiling-php-with-mssql-servers-native.html.

Hope that helps.

-Brian

---

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_swan

Many thanks sir :-)