Coldfusion 8 Performance Benchmark

I have been diligently working with as many of the new CF8 tags and functionality, creating examples, trying out new things pushing the boundaries of what some of the new tags can and cant do. But I haven't really spent much time thinking about the performance. I figured they would get some gains from moving to the new JRE version but other than that I didn't give it much thought. That is until this morning when I checked my Google Reader and saw that both Ben Forta and Ray Camden have posted some Coldfusion 8 Performance numbers.

I have to say if the performance numbers are accurate it's a heck of an increase over 6 and 7, upwards of 40%!

Here are a few of the benchmark numbers from Ben's blog:

• Structure manipulation: CF6.1=99, CF7=101, CF8=200. In other words, CF8 manipulated structures twice as fast as CF6 and 7.
• List manipulation: CF6.1=33.6, CF7=34.4, CF8=103.4. CF8 list manipulation is over three times faster than that of CF6 and 7.
• CFSWITCH/CFCASE: CF6.1=66.2, CF7=88.9, CF8=244.4. CF8 is three times faster than CF7.
• CFPARAM: CF6.1=8.9, CF7=9.6, CF8=341.4. Yep, thirty five times as fast!
• Date functions: CF6.1=230, CF7=251, CF8=1423. About six times faster in CF8.
• RegEx functions: CF6.1=390, CF7=392, CF8=987. Over double the speed in CF8.
• IsDefined(): CF6.1=136, CF7=611, CF8=1243. Double as fast as CF7, and nearly ten times the speed of CF6.
• CFC creation: CF6.1=9.7, CF7=3, CF8=69.4. Yep, performance here took a hit in CF7, but it's more than made up for in CF8.

This is very exciting news. I think it will be quite easy to sell to Managers that Adobe is committed to continuing to improve Coldfusion. These numbers for Coldfusion 8 speak to the truth of that. And as well quite easy to convince them to upgrade as soon as it's released!

I can tell you that after showing some of the folks at my office that they were astounded at how large of a performance increase there is. They, and quite honestly myself, expected to see more of a modest improvement.

I'm really looking forward to the release for these reasons alone.