Dave,
Good question. It was several months back we did the Win2K-specific tuning,
and I don't have the agreement with MS in front of me, so I'll err on the
side of not getting into specifics on their end.
Note, however, that OS-specific (Linux and Windows) bottlenecks uncovered
only impacted performance in the 1-2% range by themselves and
a) In the case of future Win2K Service Packs, these will not make CF4.x run
more than 1-2% faster, and
b) most importantly, CF5 has all the tuning from our months of effort,
representing 98-99% of the gains built directly into the CF binaries,
by-passing the OS bottlenecks ColdFusion encounters (Windows & Linux)
OS vendors have to build & tune OS components to perform well in a wide
variety of workload mixes, but with CF5, we were able to identify & isolate
these areas, tune them specifically for our needs, and include the tuned
versions of the fixes directly into our binaries.
The significant "juice" (98-98% of the gains) in CF5 came from elimination
of significant bottlenecks inside CF itself, at all levels (OS & runtime
levels being just one), and removing these artificial speed "governors"
let's ColdFusion 5 (for the first time CF history, really) run "full out",
without hindrance. Of course, to boost things further, time-critical C++
code sections were identified and replaced with new high-speed C code,
providing significant performance gains separately. It all added up in CF5
to really surprising gains in speed and SMP scalability.
I certainly understand some healthy skepticism regarding the numbers
presented in the Performance Brief. Frankly, when we ran the Final numbers,
with all our enhancements added in, we were skeptical as well. We spent
about 3 weeks in the lab re-running and re-verifying to be sure what we were
seeing was real before accepting we had a winner.
The new memory management characteristics are the other "big win" as a
result of the extensive tuning done internally for CF5. In most cases, CF5
starts with a VM Size of around 8MB, and depending on the application, will
grow as required, but on Windows and Linux, will intelligently acquire and
release large amounts of memory, keeping a good balance of performance and
VM size.
If you look at it one way, CF 4.x and below never actually "ran" full-out
before. They were hobbled by various bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the
engine, and drilling down deep in CF5 really paid off. We hope you think so
as well, once see your CF apps under load under CF5.
I'll go into more detail and talk about some extra tuning characteristics
and fine-tuning switches in the User Conference talk.
-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Watts [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Monday, July 16, 2001 1:08 PM
To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'
Cc: 'Damon Cooper '
Subject: RE: Review: CF 5.0
> We spent several months analyzing and tuning the internals,
> brought in top hired guns from Microsoft at one point in the
> case of Windows 2000-specific tuning, and our discoveries
> actually resulted in several Windows 2000 performance bottlenecks
> & tweaks that should be rolled into future Microsoft Windows 2000
> Service Packs at some point. It was a very fruitful exercise,
> as you can tell from the results in the CF5 Performance Brief.
For those of use too impatient to wait for Win2K SP 3+, and who don't want
to wait until DevCon either, would you care to post a bare-bones list of
those Win2K performance tweaks? I'm in the process of transitioning several
applications to CF 5 on Win2K, and would like to do it right as much as
possible.
Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
http://www.figleaf.com/
phone: (202) 797-5496
fax: (202) 797-5444
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