PHP 5.2.1 has been released and includes a number of stability and security enhancement of the 5.X branch. Besides the usual bug fixes (over 180 of them), PHP 5.2.1 also includes the following key improvements:
- Several performance improvements in the engine, streams API and some Windows specific optimizations.
- PDO_MySQL now uses buffered queries by default and emulates prepared statements to bypass limitations of MySQL's prepared statement API.
- Many improvements and enhancements to the filter and zip extensions.
- Memory limit is now always enabled, this includes Windows builds, with a default limit of 128 megabytes.
- Added several performance optimizations using faster Win32 APIs (this change means that PHP no longer supports Windows 98).
- FastCGI speed optimized build of PHP for Windows made available for downloading.
Further details about this release can be found in the official release announcement 5.2.1. A full list of changes is available in the ChangeLog PHP 5 at php.net.