Optimizing CF Questions.

[shadow187]

My name is Mike Clyne, and i work for BluePhoenix Solutions as a independent
contractor. I am the webmaster for their site. Their website uses Cold Fusion.
I have worked on the site for over a year, with the CF, and now i am being
asked to find out if CF can be blamed for making web pages load very slow. Our
web site has only started moving slowly after we have moved it off site about a
month ago. We moved our box of site. The box has 2.6 GB's of ram, and is using
Dlink routers. So my question is what can i the webmaster do in cold fusion to
try to get the website to move faster. We tried changing the simultaneuos
requests in the administrator, but we dont really know if it helped or not. In
the end, the real question is, is cold fusion slowing down our website, and if
so, what can we do to make it move as fast as it possibly can. Any and all
responses are appreciated, thanks in advance.

[Kronin555]

What is your site doing? is it pulling information from a database? Are you
caching anything? is your site heavily session-driven?

"We tried changing the simultaneous requests in the administrator, but we
don't really know if it helped or not."

Why don't you know if it helped? Did you load-test the site before and after?
What is the response time they're hoping for? When browsing the site, it seemed
most page requests were fast, but others hung for whatever reason. Have you
checked the IIS and CF logs looking for any error messages? maybe the servers
are restarting in the background, who knows. Have you applied all the hotfixes
for the version of CF you're running?

[fquinn@bcoe.org]

I noticed White Space Management improve performance.

>From CFIDE:

Enable Whitespace Management
Reduces the file size of the pages the ColdFusion server returns to the
browser by removing many of the extra spaces, tabs, and carriage
returns that ColdFusion might otherwise persist from the CFML source
file.

[shadow187]

Hey, thanks for your reply. I should give you a few more details. I am
working for a company that tries to get by on a shoestring, thus I inherited a
real mess.

We are running CF 5.0 with a SQL db ? both are running on the same box. They
had a staged site, but it was so poorly constructed ? the guy who brought me on
board told me not to worry about using it ? we do everything live. As you
could see, we are not doing anything advanced on this site ? we get an average
of 700-800 visitors daily, really a small amount of traffic.

Everything worked fine until they moved our box off site back in January (I
was losing my mind when I said a month ago). We are trying to figure out why
our site does as you saw, works fine then hangs. It appears that it does this
more when we are in our peak usage. They put a D-Link router on it and the web
server serves as the domain controller for two other boxes (hey, I didn?t set
this thing up). One box runs a financial package, the other runs a
time-keeping package that our company accesses from around the world ? the time
keeping package calls the SQL on the web server box.

Does any of this raise a flag for you? We have told IT what we think the
issues are, but getting things done is taking time. I do not want to tell you
what I think the problem is ? would like your opinion from what I have told you.

thanks again for any and all help :)

[rmorgan]

First, if it is running all those applications it could be the problem, it is
not recommended at all and a poor practice. Just because it has 2.6 gb ram does
not neccessarily mean anything, if the application(s) is a processor hog.

Next, the D-link router, is it the cheapest one they could find and are you
sure its configured properly.

Lastly, I noticed once when the page loaded, it was very slow and had script
errors, I only could get it to do it once, after that everything seemed fine.

Their motto is "Leading Enterprise IT Modernization", I personally would be
wary of doing business with a company that thinks running everything on one box
is the thing to do. Thats putting all your eggs in one basket.

You should talk to them about opening the wallet a little more.