Zend Server instead of XAMPP?

Scriptcase 8 Installation
#1

Greetings,
We have deployed a web application developed in Scriptcase 8 (of course!) on a Windows 2008 Enterprise server (Intel Xeon E3-1240 @ 3.50Ghz, 2TB SCSI HD) that uses the XAMPP stack (XAMPP 1.8.1, Apache 2.4.3, MySQLm 5.5,PHP 5.4.7), . I know that the speed of a Web Application depends on many factors but, I was wondering if the company (Scriptcase) recommends a specific server stack or if Zend Server can make our application run faster.

Does anybody know what is the platform or the stack that Scriptcase (the company) recommends for better performance results?

The server has 64GB RAM server and we have seen little improvements. DB has proper indexes, it is not a gigantic DB. The Internet connection can be improved but the thing is that even if we run the app locally in the server is not lightning fast. The only other alternative I was thinking is replacing the XAMPP portion of the Web Server and PHP and use the Zend Server product from Zend company. I could also try NGINX but will have to learn it first as well.

I would appreciate you guys could share what optimizations you have done or the specific server stack you use for production servers (the only thing is that the server has to be Windows not Linux… sorry, huh?).

The hardware above described is a powerful server but, I am suspicious the free XAMPP stack is what is giving us most of the slow response times apart from the Internet connection speed.
Other option would be to upgrade the XAMPP version to the newest: 5.6 that comes with MariaDB instead of old MySQL.

Thank you in advance for your ideas.

#2

This application was originally built 3 years ago and the database now has 3 years worth of data. I know XAMPP is not recommended for production but this is what was put in place originally and now we want to improve, that is why I am asking your ideas or suggestions on what server stack to use for a proper production environment. Thank you!

#3

If Apache is correctly configured is very fast, but XAMPP and similars comes with configurations not for production by default AFAIR.
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/apache-vs-nginx-practical-considerations

PHP Versios is an issue too.
PHP 5.6 has about 25% performance improvement against 5.4,
PHP 7 has about 25% performance improvement against 5.6 (readed somewhere)

Of course, you have nginx too, lighttpd…
Litespeed is a ver cool option too, but is not available for Windows.

But before to change all, try upgrading your PHP and if needed, tweak your apache conf.

And easy way to do this is to download Uniform Server. Is self extract file, just unzip on a folder, copy your project and database (for testing purposses), and try all. When you get with a comfortable config, then you can stay there, or replicate this config.

#4

Giu,
Thanks for the response. Yes, we have thought about nginx and lighttpd as well but you are right, we suspect that our Apache server does not have the optimal configuration for performance.
Thanks for pointing to the PHP version. We definitely will look into that. We think also that the MySQL version that comes with XAMPP is not very production caliber and also consider upgrading to MariaDB, what do you think?.

Again, thank you for your response! Muchas Gracias!

#5

A good production ready Wamp is Uniform server, but it works on windows server.