Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 Resource Kit

Hosting PHP Applications

IIS 7.0 provides built-in support for the FastCGI protocol, which is a more efficient and reliable mechanism for hosting PHP applications than CGI or ISAPI, the other two modes supported by PHP. The FastCGI protocol eliminates the high per-request process creation overhead associated with the CGI protocol on Windows by pooling processes and reusing them to process requests. By ensuring that only a single request is processed by each FastCGI process at a time, it maintains the required single-threaded environment needed by non–thread-safe application frameworks.

Direct from the Source: The History of PHP Support in IIS

IIS has long supported the PHP application framework. In fact, the standard PHP distributions provided two ...