php website on windows based server

performance will be good

If you are asking if the architecture you have specified is adequate to run PHP and its associated stack - the answer is yes.

If you are asking if the specified architecture will result in good performance for your application that is entirely dependent on your application - how much resources it consumes, how many concurrent connections you expect etc.

To properly answer this question we would need to know more about the PHP application you are intending to run on it.

For the most part though that infrastructure should be fine.

The hardware is sort of like the road that a car (the application) drives on. If you have bad hardware, then the car will have trouble driving.

You have listed fairly decent hardware (a single 7200 rpm hard drive is probably the one piece that will be the biggest speed bottleneck, but it probably will be fine for a while).  So your road is smooth and fine for your car.

However, if your car isn't built correctly, then it doesn't matter what kind of road it is on. If you build your car with only one wheel, or an under-powered engine, it's just not going to be able to drive, even if it's on a good road. So a lot of performance questions are going to become a question of how you build your program and what it will be doing.

You do have the right hardware for many types of applications, though.

When a web site has performance problems, it's always in the I/O subsystem, and in modern web applications, that is the database.  So study up on data base architecture and performance hints, and you will be ahead of the game.  If you've never built a data base backed web site before, consider hiring someone to build it for you.  People spend years in college to learn how to do this stuff, and design errors are very costly.  At the very least, get a professional data base administrator to design your tables and queries.

Also, I'm a little opinionated about this, but you might ask yourself "why windows" when most of the rest of the world uses LAMP stacks.  All those people who avoid windows do it for performance and stability reasons.  You might want to consider using linux instead of windows.  It's more of a mainstream and professional platform, IMO.

I don't know if I'd be so quick to dismiss Windows as a valid platform. I run both Windows and Linux (primarily CentOS) servers, and I get pretty good performance out of both. Windows Server is designed with that kind of minimal GUI usage in mind, and Linux can still be resource-heavy if you don't know what you're doing. If I had a nickel for every time I logged into someone else's Linux server and saw services running for things like Bluetooth, X-Windows (might as well run Windows at that point), and so on...

Windows desktop operating systems are a different story, since they're designed specifically for user interaction, so you have far more overhead going on by default (e.g. Aero). You can still optimize the hell out of a Windows desktop OS and get semi-decent performance, but if you're going to be serious about running a server, then there's a reason why the Windows Server operating system exists (aside from things like AD).

If someone's new to server admin and they are comfortable with Windows, then a WAMP stack running on Windows Server should be just as effective as a LAMP stack on Linux. They'll even be likelier to lock down the server better than someone who doesn't know how to effectively manage iptables and they end up leaving open holes or disabling SELinux to get past a simple problem.

No such thing as a server which benefits from a GUI. The whole purpose is not to display graphics to anyone on a regular basis, so why design a chipset architecture which integrated graphics? Wasteful cycles for graphics cannot make it faster. Look at AS400's. I ran 10 casinos on a single system with 10000 users with the power 5+ and power 6 Motorola chip. It's basically a dual core 3.6-5.0 chip, and it screamed across the U.S.no problems. I'd like to see Windows try anything close. AS400 systems don't have, and never will, a graphics adapter even available as a pci adapter card. You need to terminal emulate anything or use a HMC to make a serial connection emulating a 5250 bus on TWINAX.

All I'm saying is you can't make any argument that graphics benefit server performance, and the only reason it has any place is because it makes things easier for people who don't know what their doing. It's not supposed to be easy.

I'd like to see Windows try anything close.

First, you might be surprised about that one, but you'd have to run a valid comparison. I'm not talking about taking someone's Windows workstation and trying to make it do the same thing, but rather take a similarly-equipped server running Windows Server that has been properly configured, and runs the same, optimized stack.

I'm not arguing that AS400 can "scream" but rather challenging the idea that the graphics layer is some behemoth that eats up every byte of memory and slows everything down. I would say that it's more like CLI-only systems are like a nicely-paved, flat road, whereas systems with a GUI loaded are like a paved road that isn't quite as flat.

To me, the difference in performance is negligible in the real world, because 99% of the performance is going to be driven by the server applications (LAMP/WAMP stack), how they are configured (FastCGI vs. mod_php, which modules are statically compiled into the web server, how MySQL is configured, etc), and by the applications themselves.

By the time you reach an application's limit on usage / load on a single server, it's not going to matter whether the server is running a GUI or not. There's a chance you could fit one more end user into the mix if you didn't have the memory usage of the GUI (the CPU usage is non-existent when not in active use), but you'd still be facing other resource limits at that point. Either way, you'd still have to span to another server at that point.

So if you truly believe that an optimized Windows Server stack can't handle 10,000 users, then you probably haven't put it to an actual test before. Bear in mind that Windows Servers run large-scale MS SQL implementations, large Outlook implementations, large Active Directory implementations, etc... If it were as incompetent as you seem to think it is, Microsoft would have released Windows Server as a CLI-only operating system to better support their own products.

As far as "it's not supposed to be easy" goes, there's always some balance between usability and function. I could make the case that running BASH or virtually any of the common CLIs is too heavy. After all, BASH has all sorts of scripting functionality that goes unused everyday but still takes up memory. Maybe using any operating system except those with a minimalist kernel and shell is simply too easy/too much overhead. You -could- squeeze a few extra cycles in there...

I know very well what I'm doing on Linux (multiple varieties), BSD, and Windows Server and have been admin-ing those operating systems for almost 2 decades now. I would hate to try and admin some of the more complicated systems without a GUI, but that's just me. I even use client-side GUI apps for stuff like admin-ing MySQL, even though I -could- log directly onto the server and run the commands though the MySQL shell. So I think there's a LOT of room for usability and ease in the admin world, and the GUI doesn't significantly impact server performance unless an admin is trying to actually use it like a desktop, in which case, that's just PEBKAC.