Memory Leaks

Report · May 19, 2008

Hi CFrs,

I'm comparing Cold Fusion to PHP for a web application project. So far it looks like Cold Fusion would be faster to develop with but hosting would cost quite a bit more.

I used Cold Fusion five years ago on a large corporate web site with three servers, load balancing, and a separate database server. We had problems with memory leaks and had to periodically reboot the servers when they slowed down. It seemed that MySpace had this problem as well. Are there still server performance issues with Cold Fusion 8?

Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer.

Report · May 19, 2008

We have 10 load balanced CF servers running multiple instances on each and the only memory issues we have are with legacy code that relies too much on the session scope.

What's the scope of your site? Inexpensive CF hosting can be found, but if you need dedicated servers, hardware load balancing and such, it'll be expensive regardless of your programming language.

And FWIW, MySpace was originally built on CF 5 which was based on C++. The biggest issue they had was the I/O to their SQL Server pools. They moved to SQL Server 2005 and moved the CFML code base to BlueDragon.NET. The communication between the .NET framework and SQL Server 2005 is very optimized, so their I/O problems went away.

So they're still writing parts of MySpace with ColdFusion code (CFML), it's just compiled to .NET classes.

Since version 6, Adobe ColdFusion runs on Java.

Report · May 19, 2008

Thanks for the great information! The site I'm talking about gets around 500 visitors a day, so I don't think we need multiple servers, just some kind of DNS failover. I found some inexpensive CF hosting but the reviews were terrible. My client will balk at $30 a month as he currently pays less.