"Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one."
- Malcolm Forbes

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 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 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.