title: How to know for sure if FastCGI is being used to run php scripts
body: <p>I have a hosted site and I'm having trouble configuring Joomla (running Joomla + php + mySQL on IIS7 + win server 2008). I have a similar configuration running on a local machine (Joomla + php + mySQL on IIS7 + vista x64), so I was at least able to follow instructions showed in various tutorials on how to set this up.</p>
  
  <p>This symptom with the hosted site is that I can't turn on any SEO settings in Joomla (not even the first setting, "Search Engine Friendly URLs"). I get either 404 (file not found) or the URL appears correctly rewritten but it's always the home page's content that is displayed. I had a similar issue on my home machine and it turns out to have been because I wasn't using FastCGI to host php, so I decided to investigate that on the hosted site.</p>
  
  <p>Anyway, I noticed in the web.config file of the directory hosting joomla on the hosted site the following line:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;add name="Plesk_Handler_3522909676" path="*.php" verb="*" modules="IsapiModule" scriptProcessor="c:\program files (x86)\parallels\plesk\additional\pleskphp5\php5isapi.dll" resourceType="Either" /&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>From past experience, I know that php has some issues when not running under fastCGI. I noticed the web.config in the root folder used the following line instead:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;add name="Plesk_Handler_0286090609" path="*.php" verb="*" modules="CgiModule" scriptProcessor="c:\program files (x86)\parallels\plesk\additional\pleskphp5\php-cgi.exe" resourceType="Either" /&gt; 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I copied that in the web.config in the joomla directory, and got different behavior... but still not working. If I load a .php file in the joomla directory that runs phpInfo(), under Server API it says CGI/FastCGI . Is that <strong>positive confirmation</strong> that FastCGI is being used? Why does the handler in the web config point to modules="CgiModule" instead of modules="FastCgiModule" (I'm not even sure that exists, but I just find the mention of CgiModule suspicious).</p>
  
  <p>It's a hosted site, so as far as I know I don't have access to ApplicationHost.config file...</p>