The IIS Team has released the FastCGI Extension 1.5 for IIS 6.0 and IIS 5.1 – Beta.
It’s an upgrade of the existing FastCGI Extension 1.0, based on the same technology and this new version adds several important improvements and features.
The FastCGI Extension 1.5 includes these new features:
- Monitor changes to a file. The extension can be configured to listen for file change notifications on a specific file and when that file changes, the extension will recycle FastCGI processes for the process pool. This feature can be used to recycle PHP processes when changes to php.ini file occur.
- Real-time tuning of MaxInstances setting. This MaxInstances setting dictates the maximum number of FastCGI processes which can be launched for each application pool. If it is set to 0 then FastCGI extension will automatically adjust the number of instances up or down every few seconds based on the system load and number of requests waiting in the queue.
- STDERR stream handling. There are several options of how the extension can handle text sent by FastCGI application on STDERR. The extension can send the error data as a failure response to the HTTP client or it can ignore the error and send whatever was received on STDOUT as a response with 200 status code.
- Sending a termination signal to FastCGI processes. The extension can be configured to send a termination signal to FastCGI process before terminating it. This enables FastCGI process to do a clean shutdown before getting killed.
- _FCGI_X_PIPE_ environment variable. This variable is set by FastCGI extension and it contains the name of the named pipe that is used for communication between the extension and FastCGI process.
- Relaxed enforcement of response headers syntax. The FastCGI extension has less strict enforcements for the correctness of the response headers.
Read more at source.