JohnBs personal blog

As well as the Macromedia support section I found a number of great pieces of information on clustering, performance and jvm tweaks on two of MMs support engineers websites

• Brandon Purcells blog - in the ‘Popular Blog Entries’
• Sarge’’s blog - mostly in the CF category

Steve Erat, just commented in my previous post on the subject with a link to his excellent looking Cheat Sheet. It’s always the way, only after you do something do you find all the documentation….least i was close with most of my settings!

After attending MM UKs Lucas Sherwood’s and Prismix’s Nik Richardson’s excellent presentation at lastnights UKCFUG on CF Performance I figured I’d give some of the stuff they spoke out a try out…

So, they spoke about clustering CF (remember, it’s only available in CF Enterprise!) so rather than having IIS connected to a single CF instance you could connect IIS to a clustered CF instance. This morning I downloaded the trial of CFMX 6.1 and installed it in J2EE mode on a test platform (Dual Zeon 2.8Ghz, 2Gb RAM etc etc). I was already familiar with creating instances of CF within the J2EE server but clustering it was not something i’d tried before - and i can’t believe how easy it is….create a few (3 is the magic number) J2EE servers and deploy CF into each one - then choose ‘Create New Cluster’ from the top menu in the JMC, select your CF instances, click OK and it’s pretty much done. Fire up the Web Connector and connect Apache/IIS to the clustered instance - wham bam, thank you mam! Now I have load balancing/fail over of CF on a single server…and all i have to do is present the business case for implementing it!! Next stop, load balancing across servers and instances…

If your IP is 217.34.92.1 and you’re a BT Openworld customer picking up my feed every 3 hours then please check your RSS subscription URL to my blog - you keep generating errors! If it goes on i’ll have to resort to more extreme measures….the hope is you’ll see this on my site as you won’t be seeing it on the feed!

Well, almost - Ben Forta will be launching Cold Fusion ‘Blackstone’ to the UK at the UKCFUG on February 15th.

More details here

Another Elvis track released in the UK last Monday and this weeks charts have just been announced and Elvis only managed a number 2 (Wasn’t that where he died? Sorry, bad joke!)! I’ve got nothing against Elvis but 18 weeks of consecutive numbers 1s wasn’t all that appealing - so, he’s managed 2 weeks with different songs, maybe it’ll change next week….

There was once a plethora of free online data storage offerings but since the ‘burst’ they’ve dried up almost to extinction - Streamload is one of the few remaining companies to offer ‘free’ online storage. In fact, for free you get 10Gb of storage space but are limited to 100Mb of downloads a month. If you part with your dollars packages range from $5 pm for unlimited storage and 1gb of downloads a month through to 60gb transfer a month for $40 pm again for unlimited storage.

It’s ideal for storing mp3s or backups of photos and other important data. If you opt for a paid service you can ‘host’ files so anonymous users can download files from you - potentially saving bandwith at your ISP perhaps? You can send file’s to other Steamloaders or email links from the site sp people can collect files from you - there’s also a handy helper app for running locally to allow you to drop files directly into your Steamloader account.

Click here to open a free unlimited file storage account!

Not sure what got me started looking at http compression just now but from what i’ve read i’m amazed that more people aren’t taking advantage of it to save on bandwidth and increase response times.

HTTP compression is available on both IIS and Apache. Whilst IIS (we’re talking v6.0 - previous versions of IIS were full of bugs when using HTTP compression) is able to compress static files by default it won’t compress application files. The Microsoft IIS6 pages link to an addin called ZipEnable from port80software.com. They offer a free trial but it only costs $80 when it’s over. On the port80 site there’s an analyzer to show the benefits of enabling compression. Compression is achieved at the cost of processing power but the tool has a limit to the amount of CPU it can use if the server gets hammered.

Requesting my blog page before i enable compression the tool reports the file size is 28153 bytes, if it were compressed i could reduce it to 10148 bytes achieving 65% compression and speed improvements of 2.7 times. Well, i installed the trial and using WebOptimization.com checked to see what had actually happened - before enabling compression WebOptimization reported the HTML object size as 28148 bytes, enabling compression it was reduced to 8549 bytes (using level 5 compression) so that’s around a 70% compression level.

I’m going to leave it running for a while and see how it responds but using less bandwidth can’t be a bad thing these days - plus reduced size means faster responses. Incidently, on Apache you’d want to use the mod_gzip module to enable http compression.

This thread got me thinking about using framesets with Fusebox4.1. Now, I’m not a big advocate of framesets but they do have their uses (on occassion). I’ve used them with Fusebox3 but haven’t needed to use them with Fusebox4.x.

It’s important to remember that the fact that you’re using Fusebox to structure your application is irrelevant, frames will work just the same - you just need to think ‘Fusebox’ when you’re calling your frameset and remember the problems that you may encounter. A typical Fusebox HTML frameset call will look something like;

Coupled with this, you need a fuseaction that will initialize this frameset - if you’re running your entire site in frames then the default fuseaction is a good place to do this, so you might end up with a fuseaction called ‘frameset’ that calls a template named fra_setup.cfm that included the above code. Rather than specifying individual files for each frame source you send the request back through the Fusebox to the associated fuseaction to load in a specific frame.

It’s all well and good but you HAVE to remember the caveat. When your frameset runs it will initiate as many HTTP calls as the number of frames you’re calling - that means in development mode you overwrite the application scope every request so you can end up with one request over writting another. As Sean ends the quoted thread you can fix it by switching to production mode - but in a development environment it’s something to be mindful of.

I wrote a simple 4 frame test to see if i can make it trip up but i couldn’t - even in development mode…

Apologies if you’ve been seeing an error relating to request.dsn when you browse my site - i’d changed some variables and all my non CFC code were still using request.dsn - oops!

The 1000th number one in the UK is….Elvis Presle for the second week running. But, it’s a different single from last week as they’re releasing a new Elvis single every week for the next 18 or so weeks here in the UK!!! Rumour has it the copyright is ending soon on the Elvis collection so the owners are trying to get the final pile of sales in. It’s probably also an attempt to revive UK sales - for the first time in chart history legal downloads surpassed shop sales in December. By rereleasing old songs the music labels are targetting a generation that perhaps usually doesn’t normally buy singles…clever!