There’s an article in the latest eWeek magazine, entitled “Scaling Ruby on Rails”, that’s instructive for those of us in the ColdFusion community. RoR is going through that time-honored rite of passage experienced by any programming language that gains wide adoption. Namely, so-called critics are questioning its scalability and its suitability for mission-critical applications. Sound [...]

At Webapper, we’ve always described our tuning & troubleshooting consulting as a “wire-to-wire” service. This means that we find and fix performance and/or stability problems wherever they are, even if they’re in the network layer (e.g., the TCP “silly window” problem). And beyond troubleshooting production systems, we’ve always found that HTTP sniffers are useful during [...]

At Webapper, we’re big fans of monitoring tools. You absolutely MUST be able to see what’s going on inside your software in real time. We use MySQL on some of our production servers, and we’ve been using SQLyog as an administration GUI for many years. It’s a great way to run MySQL databases–it’s one of [...]

I wrote a post not too long ago about using lighttpd (lighty) to ease your server load. My setup consisted of one high-end server box (2x Dual-core Xeon’s, RAID 5, 6GB RAM) running Windows Server 2003 x64 and Virtual Server 2005. Virtual Server had three VM’s running… my CF/IIS server, my database server, and my [...]

So it was brought to my attention during my CFUNITED presentation on Tuesday morning that a few slides of high interest were not viewable on-screen or in the conference book. Specifically, there’s a great Viso diagram of the template request workflow as it applies to ColdFusion and the settings for Trusted Cached and Saving [...]

I had a website with an issue. This site is successful on several levels… It gets a good number of visits (500,000/month), each visitor hits nearly 10 pages per visit (so around 5,000,000 page views/month), and ranks well with search engines. While this might sound like a slightly above-average site, the problem lies with it’s [...]

I’ve been working with two virtual private server plans from hostmysite.com, one that comes with CF Standard preinstalled, one that does not. (The CF+ and .NET+ plans, respectively.) The VPS plans are a great way to get your own semi-dedicated server for el-cheapo prices and full control. But in addition to hostmysite not following their [...]

I’ve been building an app that uses CFDocument to build out some FlashPaper and PDF’s. Everything was working great on my local development box, but when I pushed it to my production box, generation of both the FlashPaper and PDF files was taking forever. Processing time went from 4-5 seconds to 3-6 minutes. Eventually, I tracked [...]

This article is really a must-read. Some sites are just fast, fast, fast (like Gmail). Others are always slow, no matter the pipe you have (like wired.com). Aaron Hopkins will tell you why. (I ripped this link from here.)

We made an interesting discovery in a recent consulting engagement, and we wanted to share what we found with the community. The gist of what we found is that cfswitch, with a string expression, and especially under load, runs dramatically slower than the equivalent cfif-cfelseif-cfelse block. Here’’s what happened… A customer purchased one of our one [...]