ln the last issue we discussed how PHP performed on various platforms. And based on our findings we plotted a graph which showed that Linux with Apache was the best choice. But we also noticed that if the number of the executions is increased than the difference between the time taken by both Linux and Windows servers decreases. So this time, we increased the number of executions from 4000 to 5000 and even 6000 to check the effect. The setup used is exactly the same as that used for previous trials.

Setup

We used a dual boot machine of Windows and Linux. This made sure that the machine wasn't just identical But actually the same in both cases so that there was no chance of getting any performance difference due to hardware issues. Just to reiterate, we used a Core2 Duo machine with 2 GB RAM.

We installed Fedora 10 64-bit and Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition. The Linux machine had Apache 2.2 and PHP 5.2 installed on it. And on the Windows machine we installed IIS 7 with FastCGI enabled and then installed PHP 5.2.9 (the latest release today) on the same machine. The OSes and the web servers were kept in their default state and no optimization was done so we could compare the raw performance of all servers with default settings. We also used 32-bit version of Fedora 10 to compare the performance difference.