Every month when it comes time to write this editorial, I look around at a variety of sources for inspiration. It's not as easy writing each month as most of us on the magazine (hopefully) make it look. In order to cover the CF universe with the bird's-eye view that we've got here on a monthly basis, it requires keeping up on all the various goings-on throughout the real-time Net, and then selecting those things that can be covered each month in the space given.
Looking for inspiration this month was one of the easier tasks because there was some good news to report, and who doesn't like good news? I came across a proud blog entry by Dominic Plouffe, cofounder of FuseTalk (www.fusetalk.com). He talks about AnandTech Forums, a client of theirs whose site is devoted to the discussion of computer hardware(http://forums.anandtech.com). They've recently been named the second largest forum on the Web today, by Big Boards (www.bigboards.com), a site that tracks online message boards. This is all quite relevant here because not only does AnandTech run off of ColdFusion, it's running off of it quite well.
We tout CF success stories in the magazine from time to time, and a couple of times a year cover what major sites out there are running off of CFML. Ben Forta has an excellent ongoing list up on his site at http://forta.com/cf/using. The feedback that we've received from readers on this is that aside from being an interesting break from the technical content, this data helps sell clients on using one of the CFML servers on the market today.
As a whole, the language, because of the easy learning curve that attracted many of us to it, has often been unfairly dismissed as a tool for beginners, not given the credit that it deserves for what it can do when used right. It's sometimes a challenge to both those in the consulting space, and those of us in internal IT departments to present CF-based solutions and to defend them among all the other solutions out there.
Getting back to the AnandTech forums, they are currently serving 120,000+ users off of a FuseTalk ColdFusion solution pulling from a back-end database of over 9.4 million messages. The forums see 14–20 million page views, and about 2 million unique users per month.
We checked with the folks over at FuseTalk about the hardware configuration, and here's what they're running off of:
Database Server:
Microsoft SQL Server 2000
3GB memory, RAID 10
Dual 1900 AMD processors
Web servers (3 of them):
ColdFusion 5
512MB memory • 1 IDE hard drive
Dual 1900 AMD processors
Because of the sheer technical power that they're throwing at it, as well as the high amount of traffic, they're using hardly any caching of the forums – it's hitting that SQL server constantly. Additionally, the three Web servers provide a redundant system to serve it all up.
It's important to tout the CF_Success stories out there, and if you've got one of your own running a top-tier site, let us know for future coverage!
One other bit of recommended reading this month is a great blog entry by Ben entitled, "The Changing Case Against ColdFusion," which is another must-read (http://forta.com/blog/index.cfm?mode=e&entry=935 ).