Last week my work brought in a CF consultant from Universal Mind to help evaluate the performance of our flagship application and offer suggestions for improvement. On Tuesday this consultant was set up to give us a presentation on CFMX performance, and like most learning opportunities I attended the session. To my surprise, the consultant was Brandon Purcell... holy sh*t... I have been reading his blog for a few years now and regard him as being a CF rockstar along with the usual names.
Brandon was really cool and dropped some interesting tips on performance, some of which I had never considered before like using <cftransaction> with an isolation level of read_uncommited to speed up SELECT statements. Of course this only applies to queries where the returned results don't have to 110% accurate as the drop in the isolation level will curtail around locks from INSERTs and UPDATEs. I never thought of using <cftransaction> for anything other than managing 'atomic' transactions that included writing to the db.
Another interesting tip that he pointed out was the use of logging run time metrics directly to the screen but using HTML comments to hide them from the users. I think in non-MVC frameworks this would well and never really considered dumping runtimes to the display in a production environment, but I guess it's a quick way to see how well a page is rendering without going through hoops to get that info (in a large corp. environment where not everyone is privy to accessing production logs without waiting for someone else to get them for you).
Brandon had a ton of other great performance tuning tips, most of which I already knew about, but it was still cool to hear it from someone who has been around CF as long as he has. I really need to start going to more conferences and getting involved in some type of Users Group.
Viewed 1009 times
Comments (0)
Now that the development and SIT phases of my current project are coming to an end, I've been focusing on preparation for Performance and Load testing. The application that I've been working on was written in Java and runs completely behind the scenes, so using Mercury Loadrunner or some other load testing tool for metrics gathering was out of the question.
The approach that I decided to take was to write a tool in CF that would parse the log files produced by the application (via log4j), aggregate the runtimes for various classes and method and then produce a graph to show average runtime for various components.
The log files that I worked with had timestamps that look like this,
11/30/2007 13:01:59,123 (MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss,zzz where z is milliseconds).
In the course of building my metrics tool, I wrote the following UDF to aid in calculating time differences in milliseconds. ** variables.runDate is set on instantiation of the object that this udf sits in.
With recent articles proclaiming Coldfusion to be dead or dying, there have been several 'rebuttal' posts by members of the CF community. Many of those rebuttals did a good job of showing other readers that Coldfusion is alive and kicking. One theme that constantly came up was that Coldfusion enables you as a developer to be more productive. In my opinion, I couldn't agree more.
I think it's really hard to drive home the point of Coldfusion and productivity to non-CF developers without throwing concrete examples in front of them to see first hand. Many of the skeptical readers won't spend the time to figure out on their own if that statement is true or not, most will probably see it as "my language is better than your language" flame bait. I don't blame them for thinking that way given the pretense of the article and no examples to prove it.
My attempt with the rest of this post is to help back up the claim that CF enables you to be more productive. I tried to choose examples of task that are sometimes trivial but also part of the average everyday development.
This post is in response to the recent bashing and false claims made about Coldfusion, Flash and Adobe. To get an idea (if you aren't already familiar) with what I'm talking about read the comments left on digg, ColdFusion 8 Launches. I know that the vast majority of digg readers are high school students, but regardless of age I think that people should do research and put some merit behind their claims. Here is what I have to say in response to them: read more...
Viewed 703 times
Comments (0)
Newer Posts
View RSS feeds