Zend Server CE as a Drupal development environment on Windows

Zend Server CE as a Drupal development environment on Windows

FFW Marketing
Thought byFFW Marketing
February 13, 2010
Laptop with a bullseye on the screen

I'm now using Zend Server CE as my Drupal development environment on Windows. Previously, I used the WAMP package and was very satisfied with it due to its flexibility and stability. However, I noticed that recent projects began to get slower and slower. They had many modules enabled so by the completion time, they began to feel like real CPU eating monsters.

I'm now using Zend Server CE as my Drupal development environment on Windows. Previously, I used the WAMP package and was very satisfied with it due to its flexibility and stability. However, I noticed that recent projects began to get slower and slower. They had many modules enabled so by the completion time, they began to feel like real CPU eating monsters.

(Details: I have a Core 2 Duo 3GHz with 4GB RAM – should be more than enough for a Drupal site, even a heavy one. PHP opcaches didn't help much.)

It was time to try something new – Zend Server Community Edition http://www.zend.com/en/products/server-ce/ – the platform from the mother of PHP…

Amazing! The project's home page (development, so caching off) load time was reduced from 12 seconds (WAMP) to less than 3 seconds (Zend Sever)!

I would agree that the php.ini setting can make a difference, but not 4 times… What really does the trick are two Zend Server components – Zend Data Cache and Zend Optimizer+. It's also running PHP in Fast CGI mode, which is not a trivial task to set-up with bare bone Apache and PHP on Windows.

Zend Data Cache and Zend Optimizer

Give it a try, see the difference and let us know what you think. Best of all, it's free! ;)