(Extremely) Bad CF/Spectra Performance

[Ng Cheng Kiang]

Hi!   We've just begun to perform load testing on our CF/Spectra-based website and were extremely disappointed by its performance. We are running the test site on a machine with a single 750MHz CPU, 512MB RAM, SCSI2UW harddisk, NT 4.0SP5, CF4.51/SP1.01. We have migrated the user database, policy database and contentobject database to SQL 7.0. Whether the SQL database is on the same machine or another machine didn't affect our test results.   Using SilkPerformer, we noticed that our CPU utilization on the test web server hit 100% when we hit it with as little as 15-20 users, and < 5 concurrent connections. Which is extremely bad. Most of CPU time went to cfserver.exe. On peak loads, response time can go above 20s or more.   To give some sort of comparison, we have the same website done in ASP on the same machine, and we can easily load it with 150 users / 500 concurrent connections without the CPU utilization hitting 100%, but hovering around 70-80%. We were told by our CF/Spectra vendor that CF performs much better than ASP, but this is obviously not the case here.   We have tried turning on all the page caching for the site, but it only made a marginal improvement. Apparently we are not the only ones getting poor performance with the product, according to the number of past posts here.   Can Allaire or someone who's 'in the know' comment on this and how I can increase the performance? 15-20 concurrent users is big joke compared to what I can get with ASP (10x).   Thanks in advnace.   Regards<br> CK Ng