Unfortunately, getting memcached running on the server (Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit) took a few tricks, and getting memached running through IIS/PHP was another. To help other people through the same process (and to remind myself in the future), I’ll share the installation and configuration steps that worked for me below.

The official distributions of memcached are written for Linux systems, so the first task is finding Windows binaries. The memcached project site, fortunately, has links to Windows binaries, which are hosted by NorthScale. Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions are available.

(Note that NorthScale also offers their own . . .

→ Read More: Installing and configuring memcached and PHP on Windows]]> After upgrading the CSFBL forums to vBulletin 4.0, I noticed that performance was slightly worse than in the previous version. A little searching revealed that vBulletin supports memcached (an in-memory distributed caching system). Since I’ve got RAM to spare, I figured this is worth a shot.

Unfortunately, getting memcached running on the server (Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit) took a few tricks, and getting memached running through IIS/PHP was another. To help other people through the same process (and to remind myself in the future), I’ll share the installation and configuration steps that worked for me below.

Downloading and configuring memcached

The official distributions of memcached are written for Linux systems, so the first task is finding Windows binaries. The memcached project site, fortunately, has links to Windows binaries, which are hosted by NorthScale. Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions are available.

(Note that NorthScale also offers their own free distribution of memcached, but I was unable to get this to run on my system.)

Versions of memcached prior to 1.4.5 supported a command-line option that would register memcached as a Windows service (as in memcached -d install), but this option was removed in version 1.4.5. The simple alternative is to schedule memcached.exe to run using the Task Scheduler service (Windows 2008/Vista/7).

You can create a task to run memcached on system startup using the following command line:

schtasks /create /sc onstart /tn memcached /tr "'c:\dev\utils\memcached-amd64\memcached.exe' -m 128"

Note the -m 128 argument; this tells memcached to use up to 128MB of RAM. There are other command line arguments available; most useful aside from -m are -l (to specify what IP addresses to bind to) and -vv (to add verbose logging to the console, useful for testing).

Integrating memcached with PHP

In order for PHP to use memcached, you must download the PHP memcached library and add it as an extension to PHP.

PHP extensions can be downloaded from http://downloads.php.net/pierre. Many different extensions are in here; the one I used was php_memcache-5.2-nts-Win32-vc6-x86-20090408.zip. This extension matches two key requirements:

• PHP version 5.2 (the version installed using the Web Platform Installer)
• A non-thread-safe version of the extension (the version of PHP installed is not thread safe, which provides performance improvements using FastCGI)

Getting the right version of the extension is important; download the thread-safe version, or the PHP 5.3 version, and it simply won’t work.

Once downloaded, take the php_memcache.dll and put it in the ext folder in your PHP directory (for me, c:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\ext). Then, open the php.ini file (in your PHP directory) and add the following line to the end:

extension=php_memcache.dll

Restart IIS (from the command line, type iisreset), and if you did everything right, memcached should now be available to PHP. If you want to check, you can create a phpinfo page; if php_memcache is listed in the output, the extension is registered correctly.

Other links

To find out more about PHP, memcached, and Windows, check out the following links.

• NorthScale Memcached – a free, commercial memcached distribution that I couldn’t get to work in my environment
• Installing memcache on Windows for PHP – a blog post explaining something similar to what I just did
• memcached from Jellycan Code – an alternate memcached build for Windows that runs as a service
• Installing memcached on Windows – instructions for installing the Jellycan Code version of memcached

Together with the help of Jerry (a member of the vBulletin team), we’ve improved the import scripts a number of ways. Prior to this effort, you were only able to import users, forums, threads, and posts. Now…

The obvious choice was to upgrade to CommunityServer 2008, but problems with the upgrade script and stickershock at the new price tag pretty much put this right out of contention. I went out and bought a license for vBulletin — one of the most widely-used bulletin board products available — for $160, about 1/50th the price I’d pay to upgrade CommunityServer.

vBulletin offers some support for converting from CommuntyServer via their Impex utility. Unfortunately, the current implementation they had was quirky and unreliable… but vBulletin gives you the source code (everything, including the import/export scripts for dozens of other forums), so I began to . . .

→ Read More: Converting from CommunityServer to vBulletin]]> I’ve been using CommunityServer to power the forums at CSFBL for a few years now, with mixed results. The version I am running (2.1) is a bit buggy and a poor performer in some respects, but it is serviceable. Still, with hundreds of thousands of posts, I really need something more reliable.

The obvious choice was to upgrade to CommunityServer 2008, but problems with the upgrade script and stickershock at the new price tag pretty much put this right out of contention. I went out and bought a license for vBulletin — one of the most widely-used bulletin board products available — for $160, about 1/50th the price I’d pay to upgrade CommunityServer.

vBulletin offers some support for converting from CommuntyServer via their Impex utility. Unfortunately, the current implementation they had was quirky and unreliable… but vBulletin gives you the source code (everything, including the import/export scripts for dozens of other forums), so I began to tinker.

Looking at how the import/export worked, I was able to fix and patch to the point where it was working. There was quite a bit of trial and error (I’m no PHP expert) but in general the code was easy to follow and easy to modify.

I recently posted on the vBulletin forums and offered up some of my insight, and the guys at vBulletin seem to have identified the sales potential for having a solid CommunityServer to vBulletin converter. Hopefully, I’ll hear from Jerry soon and will be able to help get this conversion process working perfectly.

Until then, I’ve so far been able to import users, forums, and threads without issue. There’s some lingering issues related to importing posts (dates are getting lost in the import, and the overall process seems to die after a while, which could be a PHP memory issue), and I have to further tweak my private message import scripts. Hopefully with the help of the vBulletin team we can offer a viable solution to spending thousands of dollars to upgrade to the latest version of CommunityServer — not just to me, but to others, too.