Hello! 
I'd sent this mail the the php-win mailing list but wasn't able to get any advice over there, so I thought I'd give this board a try....
I've run into a problem where connecting to our MSSQL Server from our webserver using a TCP/IP connection is a -whole- lot slower than connecting to the same server using a Named Pipes connection (we're talking 10 to 20 times slower).
We are running SQL server on a non-standard port (1533 vs 1433). I do believe we had tried running it on port 1433 and still had the slowdown though.
In the Client Configuration utility on the WEB server I use the following settings:
Server Alias: mssql_named_pipes
Network Library: Named Pipes
Connection parameters: \sqlserver\pipe\sql\query
Server Alias: mssql_tcpip
Network Library: TCP/IP
Connection parameters: 192.168.1.7,1533
I want to make sure to point out that everything -does- operate fine when using the TCP/IP connection - it's just extremely slow.
We've tried connecting to other MSSQL servers and ran into the same problems where it will run fast when using Named Pipes, but slow when using TCP/IP.
Here is are 3 benchmarks of just the mssql_connect() between Named Pipes and TCP/IP versions so you can see how much slower it is. This is a sample of running
it three times (I've run this from the web and from command line and gotten the same results both times):
Named Pipes took 13.3231ms
TCP/IP took 205.6559ms
Named Pipes took 12.3510ms
TCP/IP took 174.2430ms
Named Pipes took 13.2550ms
TCP/IP took 149.0561ms
Here's the code that generated the above:
-- snip snip --
function DoBenchmark( $name, $server, $numtimes )
{
$start_time = getmicrotime();
for ( $i = 0; $i < $numtimes; ++$i ) {
$link_id = mssql_connect( $server, DATABASE_USER, DATABASE_PASSWORD );
if ( !$link_id )
exit;
mssql_close( $link_id );
}
$total_ms = ( getmicrotime() - $start_time ) * 1000;
printf( "$name took %.4fms<br>", $total_ms );
}
function getmicrotime()
{
list( $usec, $sec ) = explode( " " , microtime() );
return (float)$usec + (float)$sec;
}
DoBenchmark( "Named Pipes", "mssql_named_pipes", $runs );
DoBenchmark( "TCP/IP", "mssql_tcpip", $runs );
-- snip snip --
Finally, here's the web server and sql server information:
SQL Server OS: Win2K Server SP1
SQL Version: MSSQL 7.0
WEB Server OS: Win2K Server SP2
WEB Server PHP: PHP 4.0.6 w/ latest extensions
WEB Server: IIS 5.0
We are using PHP in CGI mode.
The PHP.exe is compiled in-house, however there are no MSSQL related changes in our version.
Here are the results of "php -m":
Running PHP 4.0.6
Zend Engine v1.0.6, Copyright (c) 1998-2001 Zend Technologies
with Zend Optimizer v1.1.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2000, by Zend Technologies
[PHP Modules]
standard
bcmath
Calendar
com
variant
ftp
mysql
odbc
pcre
session
xml
wddx
gd
mssql
Zend Optimizer
[Zend Modules]
Zend Optimizer
--
From what I've been reading it sounds like there are a good number of people who successfully use TCP/IP connections to MSSQL, so it sounds like I may just be doing something wrong - I just don't know what.
I hope that explains the problem. All I want is to be able to connect to the MSSQL server using TCP/IP and not suffer the slowdowns we're currently suffering
Thanks in advance for any help.
-Jah