Battle Stations, a PHP app, runs better on Windows Server 2008, IIS7

Windows Server 2008, IIS7

Windows Server 2008 has been released for a couple of months now. In fact, its already about half a year since its been made generally available. To re-iterate that Windows 2008 comes with a very much improved web server, IIS7.0. So much so that we are seeing a lot of interest in IIS7.0. Surprisingly, a group of such customers that expressed keen interests has Intellectual Property on the Open Source.

Just earlier this year, around Feb 08, we had Virtual Map test their PHP applications on IIS7 and in some instances, achieve 220% by moving to IIS7 from Apache.

With so much interest and momentum, it prompted 3 members of Microsoft Singapore banded together to form a team, "LAMP2WIMP". Matthew Hardman, Chris Ismael and myself.

The Customer: Tyler Projects

We have worked with Tyler Projects in the past one or two months here in the Microsoft Innovation Center (MIC) in Singapore. Tian Yang, from Tyler Projects has a very interesting, multi-player online game known as Battle Stations. You can find that application easily on Facebook. The game was so successful that they are listed in Singapore’s Straits Times newpaper as a budding entrepreneurs.

Battle Stations has a regular active players of up to 13,000 players a day. That’s pretty impressive for a game. It has a rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars rating in Facebook. I was given a look at it, ITS Addictive.

The Huge Question

Tian Yang came in to MIC to learn about what Windows Server 2008 has to offer him. After going through various capabilities of Windows Server 2008, he popped the ultimate question. "Can it outperform my current environment, Centos??". Eh.. its a trap question isn’t it? None of us dare commit to Windows Server being better. Instead we offered him the opportunity to do a benchmark exercise. Immediately, 3 days were allocated to do the benchmark.

So the question: "Can it outperform my current environment?"

http://images.video.msn.com/flash/soapbox1_1.swf

How long did the migration process take?

The day came. Tian Yang brought his application on a DVD and arrive at the MIC. He initially thought it would be tough or close to impossible to have their PHP running on IIS7, or rather, a super tough blocker to overcome. Very much to Tian Yang’s surprise, he took a mere 30 mins to have his PHP application run successfully in IIS7 on Windows Server 2008. There were no or minimal change to his codes. Can you believe that? 30mins!!

The Benchmarking Equipment

Battle Stations is made up of a multi-tier architecture. It was really easy to split the components and take out as many components as we could to make sure we can accurately test what we’re after. The performance between IIS7 on Windows Server 2008 and Apache on Centos. So here are the list of equipment used in this benchmarking exercise.

1. MySQL Server (HP ML 115 with 4GB of Ram)
2. IIS7 on Windows Server 2008 (HP ML 115 with 1 GB of Ram)
3. Apache on Centos5 (HP ML115 with 1GB of Ram)
4. Apache on Fedora9 (HP ML115 with 1GB of Ram)

Disk Configuration (same on all ML 115) – 160GB on SATA0 (No RAID)

5. 4 units of Vista running VSTS Load Agents

All machines connected by Gigabit Network.

Notes: MySQL is using an equipment with more ram to allow MySQL to cope with increased load and the Web server becomes the bottleneck instead of the MySQL.
Windows Server 2008 was loaded with Out of the Box configurations. No fine tuning or tweaking was done.

The Results

Windows 2008, IIS7 emerged the winner. You can download the test results here (Based on Wave2).

We ran 2 waves of the tests.
Wave 1: All 3 Operating Systems (WS2008, Centos5, Fedora9) – Out of the Box, no tweaking or tuning.
Wave 2: WS 2008 (Remains out of the Box setup), Centos5 and Fedora9 (Tune and optimized by Tian Yang).

Evidently, Windows 2008 is able to sustain as it scales. Performance out of the box seemingly in the test is about twice that of what Centos and Fedora could deliver. It was very much a surprise to me. I wasn’t thinking of such a gap.

Its interesting how the benchmark results turn out.

 

The next Steps for Tyler Projects

Tian Yang is going to seriously look into putting Windows Server 2008 into production.

Do you have a PHP application like Tian Yang?

If you have a PHP application like Tian Yang, would you want to test it with Windows Server 2008? If you are in Singapore, we can help you.
Drop an email to Chris Ismael with subject "LAMP2WIMP Project".

LAMP2WIMP – A project brought to you by Microsoft Singapore (Matthew Hardman, Chris Ismael and Myself)

/Dennis