PHP :: CGI or ISAPI
Few days I posted about specifying php.ini path; and Adnan posted a simpler technique to use php.exe as CGI and specifying ini path in command’s parameter.
Just wanted to say; no doubt his solution is much cleaner; but its good on development machines; on server side; especially the one who is serving some real world app; using PHP as CGI (php.exe) can be heavy; imagine 10 users hitting the server concurrently and each user sending three concurrent requests; you will be having 30 processes running; and increasing users with this fashion will start killing your server quickly comparing to using PHP as ISAPI module.
You might find lot of content on internet saying using PHP as ISAPI is not reliable; but most of them were written in PHP3 days when ISAPI integration was not matured enough. I myself has seen it working as ISAPI in shared hosting server pretty smoothly; and sometimes even better than Apache, no offence; and don’t post the usual comments advocating linux/unix and free software, yes I use them; I like them; but I don’t recommend them ( why? Some times later)