Believe the Hype

Brian Rinaldi has a pretty good article up on site point titled "Coldfusion 8: Believe The Hype".

While CF8 does indeed have huge speed improvements over earlier versions it's important to note that if you have developed using many of the frameworks you may actually experience a degradation in performance because of the sheer number of .class files that get generated.

As explained previously in an article by Mark Mandel the problem is in the Java 1.6 class loader and how it loads the classes into memory.

At server start up Coldfusion starts loading the generated .class files into server memory until the cache is full. Because of the class loader bottle neck this results in increased server startup times.

Mark further explains that in a Production environment where there are a huge number of .class files its entirely possible to experience unexpected and hard to reproduce performance hits as Coldfusion swaps out in-memory class files.

In order to fully appreciate CF8's speed and avoid the Java 1.6 bottleneck you will need to downgrade to 1.5 or wait until Sun publishes the fix.

Happy Friday...

[Editorial Note: Thanks Julian Halliwell for pointing out my mistaken use of createObject as the bottleneck instead of the Java class loader.]