IIS7 and PHP 5.3.22 with FastCGI slow on basic pages

Question

I have a PHP 5.3.22 windows server running PHP in fastCGI. It's a Windows Server 2012 but I have also tried this on a Windows Server 2003 box so it does not seem IIS version specific.

If I have a basic PHP page:

<?php
echo 'test';
?>

Why does this take 1 second to load? This overhead seems to stack with further AJAX requests to PHP so this 1 second seems to be adding up.

Basic HTML pages just containing a word "test" from the same server is near instantaneously.

Surly it can’t just be that it takes servers a second to realise this is a PHP file and to prepare PHP for code execution.

I have tried setting the application pool to have more worker processes and to have it’s start mode as “AlwaysRunning” instead of “OnDemand” but alas this seems to have no impact.

Unfortunately changing the PHP version is not an option at this time (would take too long testing, etc).

Answer 1

If it's a clean start, then you shouldn't be experiencing delays anything like that. Perhaps check if you have any plugins or similar running. Xdebug slows down executions, for example.