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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T01:50:57+00:00

I am downloading PHP for Windows. I got 2 options on the website. PHP

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I am downloading PHP for Windows. I got 2 options on the website.

  1. PHP Thread Safe
  2. PHP Non-Thread Safe

Please answer the following questions:

  1. What is the difference between the two? What are the
    advantages and disadvantages over one another?
  2. I am developing an e-commerce website which will have heavy traffic, which one is more recommended and why?
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    From PHP documentation:

    Thread Safety means that binary can work in a multithreaded webserver context, such as Apache 2 on Windows. Thread Safety works by creating a local storage copy in each thread, so that the data won’t collide with another thread.

    So what do I choose? If you choose to run PHP as a CGI binary, then you won’t need thread safety, because the binary is invoked at each request. For multithreaded webservers, such as IIS5 and IIS6, you should use the threaded version of PHP.

    So it really depends on the way that you want to use PHP:

    • Apache + LoadModule: Thread Safe
    • Apache + FastCGI: Non-Thread Safe
    • IIS: Thread Safe
    • IIS + FastCGI: Non-Thread Safe

    PHP manual has nice installation instructions.

    AFAIR running PHP with FastCGI is the preferable way, it performs faster and allows for more fine-grained security configuration.

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