Oh yeah, I kinda forgot about that part. I just assumed that part of any standard PHP install was moving the PHP dlls into the system path -- I didn't know it was Apache specific! =)

Anyway, you can actually run Apache *and* Xitami on the same machine. You can even run several instances of Apache or PHP on the same machine. Just configure each server to listen on a different port.

While testing an application I wrote on multiple versions of PHP, I had a few different Apache servers running on ports 8420, 8430, 8432, and 8433. The first digit, 8, was just a throwback to port 80 being the default HTTP port. The last three digits reference the PHP version running on the server listening to that port. For example, port 8432 was running PHP version 4.3.2.

The only caveat to this (and it's kinda nice, actually), is that all PHP instances use the same PHP.ini file for configuration, since PHP just looks for "php.ini" in your system root dir (i.e. %WINDOWS%, usually C:\WINNT or C:\WINDOWS).


Running it as a module certainly speeds things up since you don't have to run the exe every time you request a page. That's how the CGI-world works. When you consider that each time a page is requested, PHP has to parse php.ini for configuration details, you can imagine how much time you save by just having the configuration loaded once.



Take care,

Nik
http://www.bigaction.org/