Making it fast

Until today, I have been reasonably disappointed at the speed at which the pages in my wiki have been coming up. Wikipedia uses lots of stunts which aren't really open to me, like using Squid together with lots & lots of slaved servers. Right now, I'm just running on a two-processor (2 x 3GHz Pentium) box with 2GB of memory. SQL Server, IIS, etc. are all running locally. In this configuration, pages were taking anywhere from 2 to 10 times as long to display as the corresponding pages from Wikipedia. The fix is in. I suspected that a PHP accelerator would work, and it does -- beyond my expectations. All of a sudden, this wiki is snappy! The trick is getting a PHP accelerator that works in our configuration (Windows 2003 SE, IIS 6, PHP 5, etc.) The one that does it is Zend Optimizer. It's a free download. Thanks, Zend. If you're running any PHP on IIS, give it a try. I think you'll be impressed. Here are some example timings for my wiki, along with times from wikipedia.org:

Page title	Time before optimizer	Time after optimizer	Wikipedia time
Philippines	25 seconds	5 seconds	4 seconds
Arnold Schwarzenegger	15 seconds	7 seconds	5 seconds