Hello,
You are worried about performance of CF/Spectra. You state your machine
specs etc., which is good, but don't give us an indication of what mix of
CF and Spectra the site is composed of so may I take a liberty or two and
ask a few questions and propose an answer or two that might not quite fit
your scene, if so, apologies. May I also say that I wear two hats, the
senior partner in both a Spectra development firm with several sites under
our belt and/or in development and also senior partner in a specialist
hosting firm that hosts nothing but CF and Spectra Sites. I say that to
indicate a level of experience and knowledge :-)
CF is in the same area as ASP in speed of serving, you can work out special
benchmarks that prove either to be faster but basically they are much the
same. Spectra is a whole different ball game, you cannot compare Spectra to
ASP. Spectra is really a very fancy set of custom tags, written to be
independent of almost everything in terms of platform and potential
database engine. As such they are a very badly performing set of tags on
any specific platform. They do things like storing all the data of an
object type you design in a WDDX packet that then gets stored in the
database. Great for portability and making the object design
data-independent, disastrous in terms of performance.
The result, Spectra runs like a dog.
What you gain is an ability to design an extremely complex site with speed
and accuracy and later on, versatility in maintaining the site. Spectra is
for complex sites, the maintenance aspect is a very important one.
So what do you do about it? Firstly get a fairly grunty machine as a base
level machine for serving. All our Spectra servers are dual cpu machines,
512MB or 1GB RAM, UW2 SCSI, etc. That is barely enough. So secondly work
out what mix of Spectra and CF you want to use. We use direct CF engines
for query intensive areas of a site, such as a product catalogue, and keep
Spectra in the background, managing it all. Thirdly cache _everything_. You
state that you get minimal performance improvement with caching, that
indicates that something is wrong, fully caching a Spectra page should give
you better performance than even a CF page, we get either 20ms per page
served or about 80ms depending on cache style etc., compared with 20 - 30
secs for a fully dynamic page with 30 containers or so.
Do you use security in your pages? SiteMinder is an embarrassment, we run
our own home-brew security, like most other folks, as it is so slowwwwwww...
Is the performance problem across the whole site or just the back or front
ends? Keep the front end as simple as possible, don't make the containers
work too hard with fancy methods, etc. Put more smarts in the backend.
Don't use the webtop, roll your own backend.
I could rattle on for ever, tell us where things are slow and we, the List
that is <g>, can advise.
--
Yours,
Kym
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