Hi Ryan,
been out all morning, I hope you weren't champing on the bit for an answer :-)
From my research around the place I have found there is very littleinformation on running ColdFusion in a high load environment. It seems you either need to be a Java guru or have a lot of cash for consultants and MM support.
Or you've been sucking and seeing for quite a while :-)
I'm looking after a site at the moment that's having a few problems due to its load, and I can't find any metrics that will tell me what kind of server I need to run it on. The server is under the following load:
260 GB of traffic per month 150,000 page views per day
Its a forum based site so all the traffic is pure text, not many images. There are on average 2500 forum posts per day. Its running on a Windows 2003 Server machine (1G RAM, 2x2.4G Xeon) using a shared MS SQL database that's supplied by the hosting company.
Is that a busy site? I have no idea. Should this be fine running on a single server? Or should I be looking at a cluster of servers.
Its busy but not end-of-the-world stuff.
The criteria for clustering is a mix of performance/availability/security, in this case you should be able to get the performance from one box so factors like availablity/fail-over and the like should be the consideration.
In terms of 'Number of Simultaneous Requests' I hear the recommended
number is 3 - 5 per processor.
That was the standard number in the days of CF5 and early CF6, you could almost double that for 6.1 and I imagine possibly more for 7 (I haven't sucked that egg yet <g>)
I'm running this site on a Dual 2.4GHz
Xeon server, but if I put the server on anything less than 15 simultaneous requests, the queue lengths grow and grow out of control until the server halts and all users see are the characters "<." on the screen. I currently have it sitting on 20 simultaneous requests, and it seems to be coping ok... but is this an unstable configuration?
No, if the server is recent the CPUs are probably HyperThreading Xeons so you can do multiply by 1.5 in terms of capacity/thread-handling. We have our standard busy boxes set to 18 with no hassles.
In short, when you look at the figures above do you think:
"That config should be fine running a forum of that size, there's something screwed up in your code that's causing it to fail"
Are you having issues apart from the need for a high thread setting?
To give a comparison we have one site running on CF6.1 that runs at about 2 pages/sec (ie 7,200 per hour, 172,800 per day) but it has 25 database hits per pageview! (We didn't wrtite the code <hg>) It is struggling but hangs in at that rate, above that it starts quueing. It runs 20 threads.
Another box got a bit busy during the Sydney International Tennis tournament, it was running live updates of the scores. Reasonably well written code so only a couple of DB hits and cached queries, etc., and it ran at over 20 page views a second for 10+ hours every day for the whole week. That's 72,000 per hour (if it had been constant, approaching 2 million a day!). oh, and it was doing 80GB an hour, ouch!
Both those servers are identical, dual 2.4GHz, just as the one you describe. They both run at about 20% CPU, just nice, so the big difference is the code and database activity........
The databse servers behind both of those sites are mega-grunty so they did not really influence the pipcture.
Oh, and just to upset the other folk who replied, its all on WIN 2000/3 and IIS and MSSQL :-) But the statement about caching is dead right, its the way to go for high traffic.......
-- Yours,
Kym
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