Looks like almost every planet-php blogger mentioned that FastCGI for IIS thingie. I wonder: was it really that bad before it came? The thing which disturbes me in all this hype is that people will tend to think that fastcgi is something iis-specific. Hope they won’t, because fastcgi is a good (and really powerful) way to run PHP applications even if you use apache.

Top reasons:
1. FastCGI process can be run using the actual uid of user who creates the files (no need to allow group-readability of files)
2. Apache2 can be run in multithreaded-mode (aka ”worker mpm”)
3. It is much easier to switch to any other server (fastcgi is an industry standard and works with any web-server software I know of)
4. It is much easier to scale — fastcgi-application can be moved to another physical server and http-server will still be able to talk with it

FastCGI is about flexibility and it deserves a lot of good words not only in IIS context :)