>> I had originally posted this on CF-Community, but I thought >> that these results were interesting enough that others would >> like to see them. I got into a discussion at my new job about >> creating variables by the cfset tag or via a variable >> assignment using cfscript. > >I really hate these kinds of things. Don't take this as a personal attack - >I certainly respect you, Larry, I know you're a smart guy. But these "which >is faster" arguments end up the same as asking how many angels can dance on >the head of a pin.
No problem, just genuinely curious about some results. btw the answer is 42. > > >The consensus for these sorts of questions, if you can call it a consensus, >is usually derived from a common-sense understanding of how things work. >This approach is very appealing, because it lets you predict how something >should behave. Unfortunately, this understanding is often completely wrong. >It sounds reasonable enough, but is not based on actual observation and >testing. Or, it's based on an implementation detail that changes over >versions. > >Now, even according to the above description, there shouldn't be much >difference between the two, because if you're replacing exactly one tag with >a CFSCRIPT block, there would only be one library imported; the one for >CFSET. And, there's no reason to believe that there's more unused >functionality in a CFSET than a CFSCRIPT. But again, this interpretation >I've just made is based on a common-sense understanding of how things work, >and could very well be completely wrong, or different across different >versions of CF. > >> Generally these results go against what's commonly thought. >> However given that there was only about a half second >> difference over a million iterations, is it really an >> important difference? > >No, it isn't. And, even if it was, it could be completely different in other >versions. It could be faster one way in one version, and faster the other >way in other versions. > >Finally, the only way to truly identify whether something's a bottleneck is >to test in parallel - load testing - rather than in serial. One thing >repeated a million times in a single script almost always performs >differently than a million scripts doing that one thing. > >And really finally, the vast majority of these "which is faster" things are >completely insignificant in the overall performance of the application. The >time spent writing your code to conform to the current belief about which is >faster would be better spent optimizing database interaction, or caching, or >asynchronous processing - things which will definitely make your application >perform better. I'm not addressing this last point at you directly; I just >see a lot of applications where a lot of effort has been spent on >insignificant items like this, while the big honking query right in the same >program does a table scan as a result of an unindexed column. > >Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software >http://www.figleaf.com/ > thanks Dave you've helped a lot. I was thinking that the next set will be load testing. You'v ejust confirmed that form me. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Adobe® ColdFusion® 8 software 8 is the most important and dramatic release to date Get the Free Trial http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;203748912;27390454;j Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/message.cfm/messageid:308480 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.4
