Great rundown Brad -mk
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] "It has always been my understanding that CF was better suited to fast running processes." In general, fast request times are desired when they are a response to a web request. Nobody is sitting in front of a keyboard waiting for your long running job to complete so there's really nothing wrong with the fact that is will run for a long time. I've run scheduled tasks that took hours on ColdFusion and it worked fine. If you have a dedicated ColdFusion server processing this job, I say do it. If you want this process to run on your main ColdFusion server that is also serving your web content, you have a few questions to ask yourself. At face value a long running process can have the following affects on the server: 1) It uses a thread. You only have so many of these available. If no more than 1 of these long running processes are gong at the same time, it will only be taking 1 thread at any given time away from the rest of the server. 2) It can take CPU usage from your CF server. This is largely dependent on WHAT the process is doing. Is most of the process CFML code execution? If so, it will probably take a lot of CPU load and will slow down the other threads. If 99% of the process is waiting on some huge database query to run, then I would say that thread will have a very minimal impact on the other requests. 3) It can cause locks on CF/Web resources. This depends on what the code does. There could be CFLOCKs your app may have which would affect other requests. If you are running ColdFusion Standard, there are semaphore locks for things like PDF generation and SMS gateways because they are single-threaded unless you have ColdFusion Enterprise. A process that reads or writes a large number of files may also bog down disk activity for the server. Memory consumption may also be an issue. Once again, this all depends on what your process is doing. 4) It can cause locks on DB resources. If this process spends a lot time hitting the database, it can cause a lot locks and disk I/O based on what it is doing. If it is reading only, this would be a very good place for a replicated DB server. So I guess my answer is a big fat "it depends". I would say there are long-running jobs that would be perfectly safe to have on a box also serving a web site. That being said, I would personally feel much safer having it run on a dedicated server. ~Brad ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Want to reach the ColdFusion community with something they want? Let them know on the House of Fusion mailing lists Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/message.cfm/messageid:329068 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.4
