On top of all the great suggestions so far, I'll share two more. First, it could well be that you're having problems of contention over resources. But it may not be as obvious (or as easy to spot) as it may seem. John mentions using FR (or you could use the CF Enterprise Server Monitor, SeeFusion, or other tools) to "see how RAM is being consumed", but I'll add a point of clarification. (Hee may have had it in mind, but did not say it, so I will.)
Be aware that such tools will show memory use *within the CF heap*, which can be helpful, but what can happen instead in this scenario (and the same with a DB on the same box) is that the memory of the IIS process doing the emails could rise, and thus squeeze CF so that it can't get all the memory it wants. Those can lead to "outofmemory out of swap space" errors that sometimes confuse people to raise the heap, when in fact the higher the heap, the higher the memory CF will want to use and the more likely you could hit a problem on a box doing too much. (So yes, for some people, lowering the heap is the solution there, but not so low that you then get "outofmemory java heap space" errors. Won't belabor the point more here.) The point is that yes, there could be indirect impact on CF of some other process using lots of resources, whether CPU, memory, disk, or network I/O (not to be ignored, as the sending emails creates network traffic on the box which could have an impact on the web server, CF, or other things). So all this is why classically people would argue that you ought to put other substantial processes (DB, mail server, etc.) on another machine. As others here have noted, many don't other and never have a problem. Like Aaron said, it can depend on each box and its config. Second, and finally, some have noted that other mail servers may be a solution to consider. It's always possible that another may do things more efficiently than IIS's SMTP server (or not). While a couple have been mentioned, I mention still more (including both downloadable and hosted) mail server alternatives as a category in my CF411 site (some of you knew that was coming!): http://www.cf411.com/mailservers Hope that's helpful. /charlie From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mark Davis Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2012 11:22 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [houcfug] sending email from CF Curious as to others thoughts on this. We have a legacy system running CF 8 that uses IIS SMTP service on the web server to send all emails from CF. The volume could be multiple thousands per day. We are having a discussion about pointing CF at an external exchange server to handle sending the email. Some are saying IIS SMTP doesn't affect overall web server performance by sending all those emails. Seems like it would/should cause performance issues on web server. any thoughts? Thanks Mark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "Houston ColdFusion Users' Group" discussion list. To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit http://groups.google.com/group/houcfug?hl=en -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "Houston ColdFusion Users' Group" discussion list. To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit http://groups.google.com/group/houcfug?hl=en
