BANGALORE, INDIA: In 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.

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.

The above graph shows the average executions per second for Linux and Windows 64-bit, after we have increased the load on both the operating systems.

The time taken by both Windows and Linux 64-bit to execute the PHP-based program. The time taken increases as the number of executions are increased.

Results
Results were clearly visible in the previous issue that PHP on Linux with Apache performed better than PHP on Windows with IIS. But if we look closer to the results than one can figure out that the graphs tend to touch each other, hence we carried our test from the point we left in the previous issue and increased the number of executions to 18,000. We took the readings and plotted them in a graph.