Quoting Rick Emery <rick@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
Ugh, we're *never* going to make a decision. My boss just sent me this email:
A *huge* "THANK YOU!" to everybody who replied; it was extremely helpful and, after my meeting with my manager this morning, she seemed to accept that the article was dated and had inaccurate information.
Unfortunately, I may be fighting an uphill battle. I'll give background for those who seemed interested in our progress, but it's pretty long, so feel free to delete this and move on to your regularly scheduled messages (though I'm secretly hoping that someone will have helpful information or suggestions).
I wrote an application, using PHP5, that displays a list and refreshes every 30 seconds (the data is constantly changing, but a 30 second delay is acceptable). As I've indicated previously, we're a Microsoft shop, so the data comes from MS SQL Server 2000. No problems, the app worked great using my workstation as the server with a few clients running the app from it. It even worked when we moved it to a server and opened it up to everyone on our intranet (for a while).
We have two different types of clients. Some use desktop computers, physically connected to our network, while others use mobile laptops connected to our network via cellular (using Sprint AirCards) using third-party VPN software (Padcom, in case anyone's familiar).
We set the application up on a Windows 2000 Server with IIS (5, I think), and it would work fine for about a day. Then Padcom clients kept stopping. They'd request the page and, after a loooooong time, display a message that the request timed out. This would seemingly happen for all Padcom-connected clients at the same time, though the desktops continued to work fine. We restarted the server running the Padcom software with no effect. We restarted IIS on the web server with no effect. The only thing (seemingly) that cleared the issue was rebooting the server running IIS.
I spent a day and a half looking at the issue with the network and server administrators, but nobody could find where the problem was. So, we moved it to a Windows 2003 Server with IIS 6; same problem. On my own, I set up a linux server with apache and placed the application there. They changed the DNS record to point to the linux server, and it has run flawlessly ever since (53 days, 22 hours, 11 minutes). Nobody has mentioned changing anything, until this morning. My manager informed me in our meeting that no language could be chosen unless it works under IIS.
So, I'm faced with finding an obscur problem, running on obscur software (the vendor for Padcom, of course, insists that they've never seen this problem). I'm confident that the problem has *nothing* to do with PHP, but am forced by management to try to prove it.
That's it in a nutshell. Thanks again to everybody for your help and support. Rick -- Rick Emery "When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the Earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return" -- Leonardo Da Vinci -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php