title: PHP on Windows with XAMPP running 100 times too slow
body: <p>PHP runs so slowly on my Windows desktop that phpMyAdmin takes minutes to open a database. Here’s a comparison of the time to run a simple PHP test program:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Windows 8.1 machine running XAMPP: <strong>3597 ms</strong></li>
  <li>iPage shared hosting: <strong>65 ms</strong></li>
  <li>A2Hosting shared hosting: <strong>26 ms</strong></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Here’s the test program…</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?php
  $rStartTime = microtime(true);
  $countTo = 100000;
  $a = 0;
  //$countTo = $countTo * 100;
  for ($x = 0; $x &lt;= $countTo; $x++) {
      $a = sqrt(pow($x, 2));
  }
  $rMs = floor((microtime(true) - $rStartTime) * 1000);
  echo 'timer done, countTo=' . $a . ' ms=' . $rMs;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The test program is run without debugging, by entering "<a href="http://localhost/timer.php" rel="noreferrer">http://localhost/timer.php</a>" into Firefox.</p>
  
  <p>The local machine is normally blazing fast. It’s running…</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Windows 8.1 </li>
  <li>XAMPP 1.8.3 (control panel v3.2.1)</li>
  <li>Apache 2.4.4 (latest is 2.4.20)</li>
  <li>PHP 5.5.3</li>
  <li>Antimalware = Windows Defender</li>
  <li>IDE = PHPStorm 10.0.2 </li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>What's making PHP run so slowly?</p>