Hardware and Software Requirements

One great advantage of Open Source software is that it provides the opportunity for adaptation to new environments. This is true of PHP. Although originally intended as a module for the Apache Web server, PHP has since abstracted its Web server interface.

The new abstraction layer allowed an ISAPI module to be written, which allows it to work equally well with Microsoft's Internet Information Server. With regard to hardware requirements, I have personally witnessed PHP running on 100-MHz Pentium machines running Slackware Linux and Windows NT respectively. Performance was fine for use as a personal development environment. That the engines for PHP 3 and 4 were developed on Intel 486 CPUs must have helped.

A site expected to receive thousands of requests a day would need faster hardware, of course. Although more resources are needed when comparing a PHP-powered site to a flat HTML site, the requirements are not dramatically different. Despite my example, you are not limited to Intel hardware. PHP works equally well on PowerPC, Sparc, and other 32-bit or better CPUs.

When choosing an operating system, you have the general choice between Windows and a UNIX-like OS. PHP will run on older Windows operating systems, although these operating systems aren't suited for high-traffic Web servers. It will also run on Windows 2000 and Windows XP. For UNIX operating systems, PHP works well with Linux and Solaris as well as others. If you have chosen a PPC-based system, such as a Macintosh, you may choose LinuxPPC, a version of Linux. Chad Cunningham contributed patches for compiling PHP in Apple's OS X. There's even support of IBM's OS/2 and Novell Netware.

PHP still works best with the Apache Web server. But it now works very well with IIS. It also compiles as a module for the fhttpd Web server. You can make PHP work with almost any Web server using the CGI version, but I don't recommend this setup for production Web sites.

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