What Could Microsoft Do To Make PHP Run Better On Windows

What could Microsoft do to make PHP run better on Windows Manuel Lemos mlemos@prophp.com.br www.prophp.com.br www.php.org.br Microsoft Web Dev Summit 2008 Redmond, November 18, 2008

The problems ● PHP Windows developers face challenges that they would not face when using PHP on other platforms ● Some PHP features do not work well on Windows ● Some Windows specific features are not supported directly by PHP extensions ● PHP core lacks of Windows developers ● “PHP Windows developers are second-class citizens” – Rasmus Lerdord – PHP creator ● Microsoft may help

Existing pure PHP code based solutions

Finding and sharing PHP components for Windows ● Some problems can be solved with pure PHP code ● PHPClasses.org site distributes contributed solutions in the form of classes of objects ● Anybody can contribute with their own PHP classes ● There is a category for Windows specific components: www.phpclasses.org/browse/class/69.html

Accessing Windows shares that require authentication ● PHP cannot access files on Windows remote shares that require authentication ● Victor Varela from Spain solved the problem with the stream wrapper class SMB4PHP: www.phpclasses.org/smb4php ● It uses smbclient program to access files with names with the format: smb://user:password@host/path/to/share

Sending email via SMTP server that requires authentication ● PHP sends email via SMTP on Windows ● The mail() function does not support SMTP authentication ● The MIME message class can solve that problem: www.phpclasses.org/mimemessage ● It supports LOGIN, PLAIN, MD5, NTLM authentication methods via SASL library: www.phpclasses.org/sasl ● Comes with easy replacement function smtp_mail()

Sending e-mail via Microsoft Exchange mail pickup folder ● PHP can queue email much faster when Microsoft Exchange queue pickup folder is available ● Just create email files and drop in the pickup folder ● The MIME message class comes with a sub-class specialized in queuing messages that way: www.phpclasses.org/mimemessage

Solutions that require changes on PHP core code for Windows

Windows implementation of GetMXRR function ● The DNS MX records point to the SMTP server that receives messages for a given domain ● Emulating a delivery to the SMTP server in the MX records can be used to verify if a e-mail is valid ● GetMXRR() function returns the MX records but it is not implemented in PHP under Windows ● A patch to PHP could enable the GetMXRR() function under Windows, so very popular e-mail validation components could also be used in PHP on Windows: www.phpclasses.org/emailvalidation

HTTP NTLM authentication built-in PHP ● NTLM protocol is used to authenticate users during Windows logon ● Web servers that require this authentication on the same Windows domain can reuse credentials to avoid asking passwords again to the users ● PHP has built-in HTTP basic authentication support but not NTLM. It depends on Web server extensions and additional configuration not integrated with PHP ● Built-in NTLM authentication support independent of the Web server would be better

Better file locking support on Windows ● File locking is used to prevent corruption of files being changed by multiple users at the same time ● Examples: content caching and access counters ● PHP file locking function flock() do not work well under Windows

Making PHP extensions run with stability in multithreaded Web servers ● Multithreaded Web servers like IIS and Apache 2 (worker) take less memory to serve the same number of simultaneous HTTP requests ● Less memory per request leads to less costs to scale ● PHP is mostly thread-safe but some extensions and dependency libraries aren't ● Making C/C++ code thread-safe is not a trivial task ● Dr. Sagar Chaki <chaki+@cs.cmu.edu> developed a tool named Beacon to verify code thread safety ● Beacon could be used to certify which extensions are thread-safe and which need to be fixed

Questions? Thank you! Manuel Lemos mlemos@prophp.com.br www.prophp.com.br www.php.org.br

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What Could Microsoft Do To Make PHP Run Better On Windows

by Manuel Lemos

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