high traffic on cf?

[Moron]

I've been working with CF for years on many small sites. I have the
opportunity now to get into an enterprise level gig. They are expecting
(conservatively) 40K unique visitors a day for about a month at their peak.
So, I go clustered (3 web servers on IIS and a couple SQL 2005 db servers) with
CF enterprise - get it all tuned up. Does anyone have any examples of CF in
this environment being able to handle this kind of volume? Not trying to stir
the pot here, but honestly, I'm thinking about going .NET at this point - I
can't find anyone bragging about CF holding this kind of traffic. So... got
any case studies to make me more at ease about CF on high volume?

[xentrix]

Just look at macromedia/adobe.com. They're doing exactly what you're talking
about.

<a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge
href="http://www.adobe.com/special/under_the_hood/report3/

Andy">[url]http://www.adobe.com/special/under_the_hood/report3/[/url]

Andy</a>

[Moron]

The highest volume I found in your case studies was around 13K unique
visitors/day... which is about a third of what we're expecting. Can you tell
me any info about the traffic on the Adobe site - specifically session
volume/simultanious users?

Also, IIS doesn't seem to be the answer for this volume level - I'm not
finding any CF/IIS combo cases for high traffic. Any comment on IIS in this
mix?

[ke4pym]

ColdFusion will only be as stable and scalable as the code you throw at it
(.NET will be the same way). Throw crappy code at it, and it'll choke with 2
users.

IIS can easily handle 13k users/day. That's nothing. IIS, as a web server is
actually pretty good. I don't care to much for it as an app server though.

To backup my statement, our intranet server (a CPQ Proliant DL380 dual
P4/3.2GHz with 4GB of RAM, SmartArray 6400 w/256MB cache, and 15krpm disks
running CF 7.0.1 enterprise with two clustered instances) earlier this week
served 3.2 million hits with 9k unique visitors with an average 7a-5p CPU
utilization of 15% on a -single- app server.

And, we maintained an average page response time of 0.22 seconds. If I can do
that on one box, you certainly should be able to easily handle that load on the
infrastructure you discussed in your orginial post - again, if your site is
coded to scale. Our intranet server has to host many (currently around 70)
different kinds of apps (all healthcare related) written by developers whos
skills run the gammut of pretty good to super talented.

While 9k/unique users is no where near your predicted 40k, keep in mind our
intranet has a very limited audience (of around 25,000 people). But those 9k
users are banging on the applications very hard 24/7/365.

So, in a sentence, yes, ColdFusion can certainly handle your predicted loads
if correctly scaled.

[LinuxInductee]

Ok, first of all, you are not restricted to IIS, Apache will work quite
well, in fact much better IMHO. Harder to administer, but once
understood, much more flexible. Yes, Apache runs very well on Windows
too.

While costly, running a hardware switch for the HTTP cluster is your
best bet. Ours happens to have an SSL module, offloading even the
encryption/decryption processing off of the HTTP servers.

The HTTP servers should have dual physical networks. One NIC to public
and the other to the back lan ( authentication server, database, JRun
cluster ).

You should install JRun in distributed mode. Meaning, setup a second
cluster behind the web servers. This is very simple to manage using the
JMC. There are some very good articles covering this configuration.

The beautiful thing with this infrastructure is that it is extremely
reliable and scalable. If you find your J2EE engines getting
overworked, build another and add to the cluster. If you need to
rebuild a box, the cluster stays online. Not to mention the back lan
is much safer behind the HTTP servers than living on the same box.

I hope this helps!

BTW, .net will give you much more of a hassle. Research deployment
issues of .net applications. Client and network requirements are not as
open. Just another opinion.

[SafariTECH]

Yes, the code is everything ... bad code = crashing systems, regardless of
technology used.

We run 2 sites on a single dual Xeon 2.4 1GB Ram Win2003 (IIS6) server + 1 SQL
2000 Server on Dual PIII 1.7 1 GB Ram Win2003 Server

Site A does approximately 1 TB of bandwidth per month, and the second has
about 30,000 visitors per day.

So long as your code is ok, and you do things like cache pages and queries
that are unchanging, then your biggest bottleneck will likely be NIC capacity
and pipe feeding the servers.

[drforbin1970]

Yes, if you scale your code correctly, you should not have any problems.
We had 6-9k unique visitors the first week of every month a few years back
using ColdFusion 4, then 4.5, IIS and SQL Server.
CF on one box, SQL on another. No problems with handling the load - at all.
Response time was great. And each user would be online for at least 30 mins
each. Heavy DB activity, inserts, deletes, updates, searches, etc. System still
runs today using updated versions of same software. More servers and user
though, and it flies!

Remember, if your apps are DB intensive, that will slow down your response
time greatly.
IT WILL HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH COLDFUSION.
Make sure queries are tight, tables normalized, Full-Text Indexing,
Filegroups, etc, etc. Also, HD speed plays a BIG part.

I've read so many times where programmers blame CF for poor response time when
the cause is bad programming, badly constructed DBs, cheap hardware, etc.

When tuned right, CF can really rip!