Hardware is important, but tuning is going to be more important. You can throw 6 GB of ram at your application on a 64-bit JVM, but unless you tune your JVM and make changes to your application to use that memory, you won't see a dramatic increase in performance.
Invest in profiling tools such as SeeFusion or FusionReactor to see where your performance bottlenecks are. If it is a database-heavy application, you may need to look at the execution plans of your queries and tune indexes. If you are running on Windows, set up a PerfMon session while load testing your application and see where your spikes are. CPU? Disk Access? Are you paging out to disk a lot? Talk to a company that does JVM tuning. There are some relatively simple things, like adjusting the different types of memory space and some much more esoteric things you can do like changing to a different garbage collector. There are also differences in speed between different CF versions and engines. One area that Railo beat the pants off of CF8 in was Object creation. If you are using an ORM that makes big arrays of objects for every query, that can be a definite bottleneck. CF9, however, made a lot of gains in the area of object creation performance. CF9 and Railo both have support for ehCache as a caching provider now as well, which you can take advantage of in your code. There is also a performance difference between using Lists and Arrays when dealing with large sets of data. Bottom line, I'd say, is buy good hardware. Get testing tools like SeeFusion or FusionReactor and then a load testing tool like Selenium. Start profiling your apps to see where the slow parts are, then concentrate on those and get advice that is more specific to the issue *your* app is having as they will almost certainly be different than the issues that *my* app might be having. Cheers, Judah On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 10:10 AM, Wil Genovese <[email protected]> wrote: > > As Dave said - 64bit will give you the biggest boost. Mainly because you can > setup massive memory allocations for the JVM. Our servers each have 8Gb of > memory with 4Gb setup for the JVM. > > More cores the better is the mantra, but we run 4 and 8 core servers and > really don't see much different between the two in performance. > > I'd stick with SCSI drives if you need a lot of read/write access. > > And yes certain JVM upgrades can boost the speed mainly because of the bugs > in earlier versions cause object creation to be very slow. > > How much load is your application seeing? Hard configuration and scale will > be affected by your applications load. > > > > Wil Genovese > > One man with courage makes a majority. > -Andrew Jackson > > A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well. > > On Mar 12, 2010, at 11:25 AM, John Foster wrote: > >> >> We are looking to speed up our application layer as much as possible. We've >> pumped the DB up substantially and had great results. I realize there are >> network, load balancer, memcache, etc and other ways than the hardware to >> have impact, but we want to buy whatever will give us some gain. >> >> Unfortunately, we didn't notice with a dual quad core server a ton of impact >> in the past and didn't seem to be able to get the full utilization, so we >> just stayed with multiple servers instead of fewer, beefier servers. >> >> Will 64 bit and many cores be the best for CF 9? Or less cores at higher >> clock? >> >> Does more memory help much? >> >> How about SSD hard drives for local source code? I wouldn't expect that, >> but somebody seemed to suggest that somewhere. >> >> Does CF Enterprise make a big difference? >> >> Should we change the JVM to a faster one? What would that be? >> >> >> >> Thanks! >> >> > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| 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:331686 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/unsubscribe.cfm
