Coder's Revolution - Performance

ColdBox Connection today on CacheBox

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 10:02:00 -0500

Just a friendly reminder about the ColdBox Connection meeting today at noon Central. ColdBox Connection is an online webinar that is held every two weeks by Team ColdBox to showcase a part of the ColdBox Platform and answer your questions. Today's is being hosted by Aaron Greenlee and will be discussing CacheBox, the enterprise caching framework which is baked into ColdBox as well as available as a separate utility for your existing apps. Here is the Connect room: http://experts.adobeconnect.com/coldbox-connection/ Hope you see you there!

Generating Primes Revisited: My Modifications To The Sieve of Eratosthenes

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 03:28:00 -0500

In a recent pissing match between ColdFusion and PHP, Jared Rypka-Hauer was demonstrating the performance of a function that generated prime numbers. The discussion really wasn't about the BEST prime generator as much as it was about how much ColdFusion can kick PHP's puny butt all over town. Never the less, I piped up in the comments to ask Jared to compare a prime number generator that I wrote a while back based on the Sieve of Eratosthene. After Jared asked some good questions about how my code worked I figured it was time I stopped high-jacking the comments of the PHP pooper train. I decided to spin off a new post to highlight some significant performance gains I was able to produce. [More]

BlogCFC Code Formatting Not Thread Safe (With Example)

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 16:58:00 -0500

I found an interesting little bug in the BlogCFC implementation of ColdFISH today. ColdFISH is a ColdFusion code formatting component that is instantiated once and cached as a singleton in the application scope in BlogCFC. The problem is, ColdFISH looks like it wasn't intended to be used as a singleton. It makes use of the variables scope to store the Java StringBuffer class it uses to gather up your formatted code as well as a number of other variables used to parse the code it is formatting. This means when two or more people hit a BlogCFC entry with larger code samples, race conditions exists. [More]

Give Your Opinion, Get SeeFusion For Free

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 15:43:00 -0500

Our friends at Webapper are giving away free copies of SeeFusion (an awesome ColdFusion server monitoring tool) to the first ~~100~~ 200 people to take their survey on ColdFusion consulting. Go check out here: http://www.webapper.com/blog/index.php/2009/11/25/coldfusion-survey/ UPDATE: Webapper is now going to give away SeeFusion to the first 200 people to take their survey. Can't beat that!

Google AdSense Servers Tripling My Traffic?

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 23:15:00 -0500

I threw some AdSense ads on my site the other day. I don't think I'll be getting rich any time soon though. I'm up to 58 cents so I figure I'll be seeing a check from Google in about 8 years. :) Anyway, while troubleshooting an error in my blogCFC I noticed I kept getting each error E-mail three times. Looking at the User Agent showed that "Mediapartners-Google" was hitting every URL I hit twice. Incidentally, I have two Google ads on every page of my site. [More]

MS SQL Server Table Variable And Nested Select Gotcha (Bug?)

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:54:00 -0500

My coworker found this interesting little SQL Server behavior today that was quite startling at first glance. It's like punching 2 + 2 into your calculator and having the result come back as 5. After pin-pointing the cause for the behavior, it ALMOST makes sense... except for the fact that it doesn't make sense at all. It involves a randomized sub-select and table variables. [More]

How To Get The SQL Server SPID Out Of SeeFusion

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:19:00 -0500

I've never kept too quiet about my affection for SeeFusion as a ColdFusion monitoring tool. I use it for debugging, performance monitoring, and basic metrics gathering. Here's an old note on the JDBC URL wrappers that I found myself digging up last week. I don't even think you can find this nugget on the official SeeFusion site. [More]

ColdFusion UDF: Calculate A Number's Divisors

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 23:24:00 -0500

Here's another UDF I was tinkering with last week. I wanted to be able to count all of the numbers that divided evenly into a given integer. I couldn't find a ColdFusion implementation, so after getting some advice from Stack Overflow I created my own. [More]

Calculate Prime Numbers: Sieve of Eratosthenes

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 23:34:00 -0500

Ahh... the quintessential math problem-- finding prime numbers. Last week while tinkering with a math challenge I needed to find all of the primes up to a given number. There was a version on cflib.org, but I thought I could do it in less code, so I dug in myself. [More]

SQL Server Temp Tables: When Do I Create My Indexes?

Wed, 13 May 2009 00:31:00 -0500

My last blog post was originally the start of this one, but I got so carried away talking about the different types of temp tables I split it off. Today's topic is when to create indexes on SQL temp tables-- before or after you add the data. Many people out there seem to hold the same opinion on the subject. I don't like taking other people's word and I also like doing things the hard way. Therefore I created a series of tests to see which way really was fastest. [More]

SQL Temp Tables

Sun, 03 May 2009 00:05:00 -0500

Here's a quick note about SQL temp tables. In SQL Server, there are three kinds of temporary tables you can use. The first kind (my favorite) are known as table variables. They only exist in memory and are not written to disk (unless your OS is low on RAM and starts swapping). Table variable names start with an "@" just like other T-SQL variables and the syntax for one is like so: [More]

SQL Server Performance: How Are My Indexes Being Using?

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 12:42:00 -0500

You may have a full-time DBA where you work, but a lot of us share the CF developer and DB developer hats. Your SQL Server's performance can be an easy thing to overlook if your database is very small, or your website gets very little traffic. The easy (but not always correct) answer to most performance problems is "add an index". Some indexes are an obvious help, but how do you tell if the less obvious ones are really being used? It is possible to have too many indexes. In addition to bloating the size of your database, they take time to update which can actually slow your application DOWN on inserts and updates. [More]

SQL Server Gotcha: Implicit Unicode Conversion

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 22:54:00 -0500

A recent thread on CF-Talk brought up this very good topic. It deals with the performance hit you can get when SQL Server implicitly converts your data to nchar and nvarchar for you when you have enabled Unicode support in your data sources. Unicode text cannot be stored in normal char or varchar fields. It must use nchar or nvarchar. These data types use two bytes per character, which means you can only store half as much text in them (limit 4,400 instead of 8,800). The problem is two fold:

SQL Server cannot directly compare a varchar and nvarchar value so it must convert one.
String manipulation or conversion on an indexed column will render the index useless

[More]

New Centuar Features Demoed! ORM, Bolt (IDE), Code Generation, CFScript

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:27:00 -0500

I just got out of a session with Jason Delmore talking about some of the new features being looked at in ColdFusion 9. He mostly talked about the ORM features being baked into the next version of ColdFusion courtesy of Hibernate. We also squeezed a few other tidbits of information out of him too. [More]

MSSQL's openquery Saved Me

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 04:34:00 -0500

Sorry I've been quiet for the past few days. My Flex adventures took a quick detour through the massive land of our AS400 and DB2. Now that I had a prototype of my pretty line, bar, and pie charts I needed some real data. My job was to write a process to fetch our sales data from the AS400 server here at work nightly and populate some SQL Server tables with it. Easy Peasy, I thought. I didn't know what I was in for. [More]