Microsoft FastCGI Extension for IIS6.0 - RTM

IIS 6.0 FastCGI Extension has made this possible for the Web Server clients to host their Web Sites having multiple sub-domains consuming different web technologies such as ASP.Net and PHP on a single server. The FastCGI extension for IIS 6.0 enables the IIS web server to support CGI in a high performance and reliable way.

CGI programs are executables that are processed by web server individually single request at a time and generates dynamic responses that are reflected back to the client. Many frameworks do not support multi-threading while executing processes on the web server. Whereas CGI enables them to execute reliably on IIS web server. But this process is not much efficient and has many performance issues.

FastCGI is an effort by Microsoft that maintains the compatibility with libraries that are not thread-safe by providing them pool of reusable processes and ensuring that each process will execute single request at a time.

New Features of CGI in FastCGI Extension

FastCGI Extension for IIS 6.0 provides the support for hosting and executing FastCGI enabled applications on IIS based web server with high performance and reliable way. Some features are:

1. High performance and reliable hosting of non thread-safe applications such as PHP that is achieved by providing the support for executing single request per process.

2. Support for hosting of FastCGI applications on shared servers with necessary options.

3. No restart of web services is required after changing the settings in fcgiext.ini file.

4. FastCGI extension keeps check on FastCGI process pool, and goes into Rapid Failure Protection mode, if it encounters more than 10 failures per minute. RapidFailsPerMinute setting can be used to customize the Rapid Failure Protection mode.

5. fcgiconfig.js can re-create IIS script mappings from fcgiext.ini file

Bugs Fixed in FastCGI Extension

1. Response failure while processing empty header values.

2. Mismatch in logged status code for any request and the status code sent to the client.

3. Tolerance for heavy load has been improved.

Following Operating Systems support the FastCGI extensions:

1. Windows Server 2003 SP2 (IIS 6.0)

2. Windows Server 2003 x64 edition (IIS6.0)

You can download the FastCGI Extension and get more information about it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2d481579-9a7c-4632-b6e6-dee9097f9dc5&displaylang=en

Continue to next tutorial: IIS 7 with ASP.NET and PHP Support to know more about the feature of new IIS 7 that allows to run both types of web pages on web server.