Windows 7 php + Symfony2 terribly slow

Question

This is an issue I've been having for a long time. I want to run PHP applications on my windows computer and it has a terribly high load time, around 10-25 seconds. I have tried many things:

• First I tried a simple XAMPP installation
• I read WAMP might be faster, so I tried WAMP, too. It gave me the same results
• Then I installed an nginx server with PHP, but it did not help either
• Finally, I installed an Ubuntu 11.10 in VirtualBox and I shared my windows files containing my project, but the result was even worse: over 22 second load time each time.

UPDATE: I have even tried APC - it improved a bit but still 6-8 sec/page

I uploaded my files to a linux server(shared hosting), on which it runs in around 300-500 ms. On the XAMPP installation I tried to run other (i.e. not Symfony2) applications as well(e.g. phpmyadmin), which too were slower than on the shared hosting, but not extremely slow, with 2-3 sec load time. Until I change to Linux as the main OS, how could I improve performance? I have a laptop with i7 CPU, 4 GB RAM, 5400RPM HDD, Win7 x64.

Thank you for your help!

UPDATE2: For some mysterious reason my Symfony routing didn't work with fcgid (it gave me a 404 error for everything) so I went back for using PHP as a module. Now, it has become the worst ever (worse than it used to be as a module): app mode 20-25 sec, and in dev mode, over 30s every time, so I get a timeout error, and it's the same with or without APC enabled.

Here you can see this error. This is reproduceable: each time it reaches a different point of execution within 30s:

Answer 1

Update:

Since PHP 5.5 has now integrated the PHP OPCache, this speeds up the execution time. In my setup a full request with database access takes 180ms now.

Steps:

1. Update to the latest php version
2. Enable OPCache
3. Disable xdebug
4. Set realpath_cache_size = 2M as DemonTPx mentioned

php.ini settings:

realpath_cache_size = 2M
[XDebug]
xdebug.profiler_enable = 0
xdebug.remote_enable = 0
[opcache]
zend_extension = "C:\xampp18\php\ext\php_opcache.dll"
opcache.enable = 1
opcache.enable_cli = 0
opcache.memory_consumption = 128
opcache.interned_strings_buffer = 8
opcache.max_accelerated_files = 4000

Why is Windows slower than Unix?

As discussed here, PHP is very slow in file_exists, and filemtime() on Windows. since Symfony2 is using these functions in dev mode a lot. we won't get under 700ms (in <= 5.4) on Windows. PHP 5.5 allows now 180ms.

A solution could be WinCache which was developed by microsoft to solve this problem on IIS. But as it only works on several Windows versions and also only with IIS it's no solution for me.

Alternative

Also a nice solution I can recommend is to have a Linux Virtual Machine on Virtualbox. This is easy to setup and is also more like the production environment.