ISAPI or CGI? Which is better?

Anon

Can anyone tell me which is better to run PHP: as ISAPI or CGI? When I say 'better' I want to know also which is faster.

I seem to have misunderstood and now im just not sure at all. So can someone clear this up for me?

Thanks
-Buzzlightyear
To Infinity And Beyond!

Anon

From my experience ISAPI is not very stable, although it may be a little faster than CGI on Win machines, CGI is definetly more stable.

Anon

I've had nothing but success with the isapi module under iis and win2k. I would guess the isapi is faster because it's 'more native' to the server (probably already loaded). I would guess the cgi has to load the ini with each request, but that's only a guess.

Anon

Yes!! I have found out, in playing with sessions and changing the php.ini file whitout restarting the server and running as a CGI, the php.ini file is read everytime a request is being made.

Anon

In the CGI version, the PHP interpretor is loaded at each request, so it's quite costly (process and environment creation).
In the ISAPI version, the interpretor is loaded once (it's a DLL), and no process is created, only a thread per request (more efficient).
So, ISAPI is faster, but, generally speaking, CGI is more reliable (memory leaks or some other bugs in an ISAPI module can potentially bring the server down).

Anon

I am using PHP 4 and which gives built in support for cgi based php. So i did not not change it to ISAPI. but i am facing problem with the environment or predefined variables. it seems for these twp different platform these variables are different.
Am i right please let me know, and send me info on this issue.

Louie wrote:

From my experience ISAPI is not very stable, although it may be a little faster than CGI on Win machines, CGI is definetly more stable.