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