> On the contrary we all have been writing code, not just CF,
> but ASP, C, Perl, and Java for quite a few years. We even
> had a consultant from Allaire come out and do a code review.
> We passed with flying colors, under heavy load, CF bogs down
> big time. I'm not sure what you consider "heavy" but we get
> over 500,000 page views per day, between ucomics, doonesbury
> and garfield. The problem became so bad that we wrote our own
> scripts that generate static htm's nightly. Our site is now
> 75% static and runs about 75% faster. I'm not knocking CF at
> all it's great for what it does do, but it does not scale.
> I'm sure there are some others out there that agree.
Do you have better success with ASP, Perl, or Java, doing the exact same
tasks as CF? That's really the important question.
No server-side CGI program is going to perform as well as a web server
simply returning a static page. In some cases, under high load, your best
approach may be to perform "offline" generation, as you're doing. If you
don't need to execute code at runtime, you'll always get better performance
by executing it earlier, then returning static results as needed. The key to
building scalable CF sites - or scalable sites with other server-side CGI
tools, in my opinion - is to eliminate unnecessary runtime execution.
Certainly, with comics sites like yours, I'd guess that there's plenty of
room for offline code generation.
I've only done informal comparisons between CF and ASP, using SilkPerformer
for load tests, but in those comparisons, I didn't see much difference
between analogous CF and ASP code. Where I did see some difference was that
with ASP, you're more likely to migrate program logic out of ASP itself, and
put it in COM/MTS/COM+, and potentially get better performance that way. I'm
certainly willing to accept the possibility that CF doesn't perform exactly
as well as some other specific CGI environment (or vice-versa), but if you
were building doonesbury.com with ASP or whatever, I'd still recommend doing
as little work at runtime as possible.
Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
http://www.figleaf.com/
voice: (202) 797-5496
fax: (202) 797-5444
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