CFObjective() 2008 - Day 3 - Clustering and Distributing ColdFusion Applications

Mike Brunt - Alagad

Clustering is becoming more and more important in the CF world. Think about it from the beginning. For example, think about paths, locale issues, etc. Software Clustering (Java, CF, JRun), Hardware Clustering Consideration, Hardware and Software Clustering, Load Testing Different Algorithms. Simply going from 1 server to 2 servers in a cluster is a huge leap for reliability.

If you are really interested in High Availability, you need to have two of everything, 2 routers, 2 firewalls, etc. A Load Balancer should really be called a "Clustering Device" because load balancing is only a part of clustering. Not sure if I agree with this because our load balanced servers have no connection to each other. They don't communicate between themselves, which I would view as vital to the idea of a cluster.

Mike will be looking and Win2K3 Network load balancer on his blog. Will also be looking at Barracuda products, which are much cheaper than BigIP.

With CF Clustering, he recommends RoundRobin with Sticky Sessions.

Remember that with clustering, if you have a hardware device that pings a page for availability, make sure the page you are pinging is OUTSIDE of your main application. You don't want it to be pulling a big Application.cfc, etc. This is a very common mistake.

Paessler - Web Server Stress Tool (http://www.paessler.com/) - This is a tool the Mike uses for load testing. Very cheap compared to alternatives.

Mike went through a sample CF8 install. He said that when you install at the very beginning you should use the CF built-in webserver for the Master CF instance because you are only going to use it for setting up other instances. Oops.