On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 9:53 PM, PT <[email protected]> wrote: > I was wondering how much use CF can really handle either as a server > product or middleware. I am not talking about situations where throwing > hardware at performance issues can get one by, but to the point where > choosing the right middleware/application backend software can make or > break an application.
Technically speaking, CF can scale very well. Virtually (or maybe literally) no-one has the scale problems of Fabebook, so I would call foul on the premise of this entire question. Many clients come to me claiming they expect this sort of traffic, but 99.99% of them are completely full of shit. One wasn't, though they still didn't even come close to Facebook on scale. Having said that, I think that the two number one problems with scaling up CF to "Facebook scale". First - cost. Justin already mentioned this, and it's a very valid point. Scaling means lots of servers, no matter how bad-ass your platform is. If the world of PHP, there are certainly lots of costs of scaling out to a bunch of servers, but the license for the PHP isn't one of them. In the CF world you pay for each. Even using VMs alongside the most cost effective CF licensing model, you're going to pay out the ass. I have no idea how many servers Facebook runs today, but in 2009 this article<http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/10/13/facebook-now-has-30000-servers/> claims that they run 30k servers (surely way more by now). Assuming only a third of those are PHP servers, that 10K servers. Even at 10 VMs per Enterprise license, at full retain price you're talking about $7.4 million dollars in licensing. Of course, Adobe might give you a steep discount, which would take the price down lower, but even at $1 million, would you pay that when PHP is free? Really though, CF doesn't live in the Silicon Valley startup space. Sure, startups use CF sometimes, but really CF lives in the corporate world, and in government. It's rare to see anything similar to FB built in CF. Pud ( http://pud.com/) has built a few things with it, including FuckedCompany, TinyLetter, and Fandalism, but that's the exception. The second problem I see getting to Facebook scale is the fact that CF is closed source. Sure, CF scales well, but occasionally it doesn't. For example, CF8 had a huge problem with UUID generation that slows servers down tremendously. In an open source software environment that would get patched by the startup's engineers, even if it didn't make it back into the product (though it probably would make it back in). In the world of CF, however, we all had to wait till CF9 came out to see the fix. Sure, in the meantime we could all code around it, or just not use UUIDs - but why do that when you could fix it yourself? Aside from those two issues, I think that CF scales very well. That one client I was talking about that wasn't full of shit about it's scale? When Sumo Consulting helped relaunch PGA.com in 2003, it ran on 2 (TWO!!!!) CF6.0 servers and managed to scale up to over 10 million pageviews/hour. We made lots of technical decisions that helped achieve this, including liberal use of caching servers, image farms, etc, but we did it, and this was on a relatively weak V6.0 release of CF as well... Admittedly though, PGA.com still isn't the same problem as Facebook because it has lots of generalized, non-individualized content. If we cached the leaderboard for 10 seconds that represented thousands of cache hits. That made things easy. Facebook shows different stuff to each person so the cache chunks are much smaller. That makes things harder. Having said all of the above, I really do think that Railo solves both of these problems. you can choose to license it for support. or not. you can also get into the source and patch anything you need to in order to speed it up. I don't know how this will all shake out, but Pud (my Silicon Valley example) has switched from CF to Railo, for the very reasons I stated above. So - yes it can scale, but as with any question "it depends". -Cameron -- Cameron Childress -- p: 678.637.5072 im: cameroncf facebook <http://www.facebook.com/cameroncf> | twitter<http://twitter.com/cameronc> | google+ <https://profiles.google.com/u/0/117829379451708140985> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Order the Adobe Coldfusion Anthology now! http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Coldfusion-Anthology/dp/1430272155/?tag=houseoffusion Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/message.cfm/messageid:350426 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/unsubscribe.cfm
