Let’s get started by getting IIS up and running with WinCache. Getting your IIS up and running with PHP itself is easy. Add the IIS role to your Windows Server setup in the Feature Manager and browse to the PHP IIS website. Once there, hit the big blue “Install PHP” button and let the Microsoft Web Platform Installer do it’s magic.

When you’re done, point your browser to this page. Another “install” button is presented. But for some reason this one does not always work (it didn’t in the Windows 2008 R2 Web edition I was using). So here’s how to get WinCache running Manually;
1. Download WinCache for PHP 5.3 from sourceforce.net.
2. Extract php_wincache.dll to “C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\v5.3\ext”
3. Edit “C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\v5.3\php.ini” and at the bottom of the file add the line “extension=php_wincache.dll”.
4. Extract wincache.php to your webroot. By default it’s somewhere like “C:\inetpub\wwwroot”.
5. Edit wincache.php and change the username and password in lines 42 and 43.
6. To be sure, restart IIS using yout IIS Manager.

Now browse to yourdefaultwebsite/wincache.php. If you hit a screen like the one below, your glasses are OK. If not, scream out lout and start asking for help…

WinCache statistics

Set up Magento to use WinCache
Back to Magento. The first part of WinCache, the opcode cache, kicks in a few levels below Magento. Magento does not know it’s there and does no need to. The opcode cache will keep a copy of the interpreted PHP opcode (created by the PHP binary when intepreting PHP files) in memory. It will use this copy each time a cached script is executed saving CPU cycles and IO operations (at the cost of a little memory). An opcode cache is vital for decent Magento performance. If your webhost does not implement one, sue them for stupidity (just kidding, don’t reference me in court).

The second part of WinCache we will want to use is the user cache. A user cache can be seen as a kind of dictionary. You can put data in it by attaching a label to it. When you want to extract that data at a later time you can access it by using that label. Magento comes with it’s own caching system. It can cache lots of things (System -> Cache management). It does this by utilizing the cache classes in the Zend Framework on which it is build.

To store all this cache it needs a backend. By default Magento will use the filesystem as its backend. It’s wise to keep it this way as the filesystem is the most likely to have space and is allways available. But it’s also wise to add a second backend that is a hell of lot faster then your filesystem. This is where we will want to use the WinCache data cache. Using these two backends is made possible by the TwoLevel cache. More on that in this great post by Fabrizio Branca.

Enable WinCache as the fast cache backend
The Zend Framework handles the backend itself, Magento just uses the interfaces/classes provided by the Zend Framework. At present the code required to use WinCache as a cache backend in not present in the Zend framework that ships with Magento. It is available in Zend framework 1.11. I’ve extracted the proper files here (download). Just download the zip and extract it’s contents to the root of your Magento installation to add WinCache data cache support to Magento 1.6+.

When that’s done we’ll need to configure Magento to use WinCache as it’s fast cache backend. Edit your app/etc/local.xml file and add these lines in the section;

<cache>
     <backend>Zend_Cache_Backend_WinCache</backend>
     <slow_backend>file</slow_backend>
</cache>

After saving your local.xml file be sure to flush Magento’s cache; System -> Cache management -> Select all -> Refresh -> Submit. When you check your wincache.php file again entries should show up under both “User cache” and “Opcode cache”.

URL Rewrites
Something else to think about when using Magento with IIS (or any other webserver then Apache) is to handle URL rewrites. IIS 7.5, which ships with Windows Server 2008R2, comes equipped with it’s own Rewrite module. By default the Magento installation contains .htaccess files which, among other things, instruct Apache’s URL Rewrite module how to handle the URL mappings. IIS does not use these .htaccess files. The IIS equivalent is the web.config file. Use a web.config file (which you have to save in your webroot) like the one below in order to use URL Rewrites (which you really should when doing this in production);

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>   
<system.webServer>
<rewrite>
<rules>
<rule name="Magento basic rewrite rule" stopProcessing="true">
      <match url=".*" ignoreCase="false" />
      <conditions>
        <add input="{URL}" pattern="^/(media|skin|js)/" ignoreCase="false" negate="true" />
        <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" ignoreCase="false" negate="true" />
        <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" ignoreCase="false" negate="true" />
      </conditions>
      <action type="Rewrite" url="index.php" />
    </rule>
    </rules>
</rewrite>
</system.webServer>
</configuration>

At this point we’re all done. Magento is up and running with IIS using WinCache.

This series of posts will compare a typical, non-tweaked, WAMP and WIMP stack, in terms of performance, running Magento CE 1.7.
Table of contents (work in progress)
1. Introduction
2. Running Magento with IIS and WinCache
3. Benchmarks (coming soon)
4. Conclusion (coming soon)