Localhost fail to load after clean install of LAMP

This article is about a serious issue with Windows 7 and Apache which was really really bugging me and caused a lot of time loss on a critical project so hopefully this will help anyone whos having the same problem..

Problem:

Installed a clean copy of windows then as required in my project installed the LAMP stack which we all know usually works out the box. after reading loads of forums about PHP5.3+ having issues with communicating to MySQL i figured it could be part of the problem so ran through their forums trying fixes and nothing worked. for some magical reason i had the internet disconnected as i just turned on the laptop executed the localhost and boom! instantly loaded including all the content from the database.

to my surprise i then figured it was a internet / apache issue connected the internet back up and loading time took a good 1-2min… then disconnected and had a instant load. so as anyone would do i disabled the firewall thinking there was some kind of interferance at no result it still failed to load i then blocked all port 80 going in/out and still no joy. i then reverted all the settings back to default to remove the blocked port 80s and any others i had put on.  to only find out that MySQL  5.5 was for some reason communicating to the outside world so blocking port 3306 for outgoing instantly took my website back to life. giving me loading times of around 200 – 600ms.

Solution:

Block port 3306 for outgoing data.

happy developing everyone, hope it solved your problems like it did mine.