Cam is and always will be my hero. When I grow up I want to be just like Cam. <3
On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 9:35 AM, Cameron Childress <camer...@gmail.com>wrote: > > Technically speaking, CF can scale very well. Virtually (or maybe > literally) no-one has the scale problems of Fabebook, so I would call foul > on the premise of this entire question. Many clients come to me claiming > they expect this sort of traffic, but 99.99% of them are completely full of > shit. One wasn't, though they still didn't even come close to Facebook on > scale. > > Having said that, I think that the two number one problems with scaling up > CF to "Facebook scale". > > First - cost. Justin already mentioned this, and it's a very valid point. > Scaling means lots of servers, no matter how bad-ass your platform is. If > the world of PHP, there are certainly lots of costs of scaling out to a > bunch of servers, but the license for the PHP isn't one of them. In the CF > world you pay for each. Even using VMs alongside the most cost effective CF > licensing model, you're going to pay out the ass. > > I have no idea how many servers Facebook runs today, but in 2009 this > article< > http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/10/13/facebook-now-has-30000-servers/ > > > claims > that they run 30k servers (surely way more by now). Assuming only a third > of those are PHP servers, that 10K servers. Even at 10 VMs per Enterprise > license, at full retain price you're talking about $7.4 million dollars > in licensing. Of course, Adobe might give you a steep discount, which > would take the price down lower, but even at $1 million, would you pay that > when PHP is free? > > Really though, CF doesn't live in the Silicon Valley startup space. Sure, > startups use CF sometimes, but really CF lives in the corporate world, and > in government. It's rare to see anything similar to FB built in CF. Pud ( > http://pud.com/) has built a few things with it, including FuckedCompany, > TinyLetter, and Fandalism, but that's the exception. > > The second problem I see getting to Facebook scale is the fact that CF is > closed source. Sure, CF scales well, but occasionally it doesn't. For > example, CF8 had a huge problem with UUID generation that slows servers > down tremendously. In an open source software environment that would get > patched by the startup's engineers, even if it didn't make it back into the > product (though it probably would make it back in). In the world of CF, > however, we all had to wait till CF9 came out to see the fix. Sure, in the > meantime we could all code around it, or just not use UUIDs - but why do > that when you could fix it yourself? > > Aside from those two issues, I think that CF scales very well. That one > client I was talking about that wasn't full of shit about it's scale? When > Sumo Consulting helped relaunch PGA.com in 2003, it ran on 2 (TWO!!!!) > CF6.0 servers and managed to scale up to over 10 million pageviews/hour. We > made lots of technical decisions that helped achieve this, including > liberal use of caching servers, image farms, etc, but we did it, and this > was on a relatively weak V6.0 release of CF as well... > > Admittedly though, PGA.com still isn't the same problem as Facebook because > it has lots of generalized, non-individualized content. If we cached the > leaderboard for 10 seconds that represented thousands of cache hits. That > made things easy. Facebook shows different stuff to each person so the > cache chunks are much smaller. That makes things harder. > > Having said all of the above, I really do think that Railo solves both of > these problems. you can choose to license it for support. or not. you can > also get into the source and patch anything you need to in order to speed > it up. I don't know how this will all shake out, but Pud (my Silicon Valley > example) has switched from CF to Railo, for the very reasons I stated > above. > > So - yes it can scale, but as with any question "it depends". > > -Cameron > > -- > Cameron Childress > -- > p: 678.637.5072 > im: cameroncf > facebook <http://www.facebook.com/cameroncf> | > twitter<http://twitter.com/cameronc> | > google+ <https://profiles.google.com/u/0/117829379451708140985> > > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Order the Adobe Coldfusion Anthology now! http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Coldfusion-Anthology/dp/1430272155/?tag=houseoffusion Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/message.cfm/messageid:350427 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/unsubscribe.cfm
