Architecting ColdFusion For Scalability And High Availability. Ryan Stewart Platform Evangelist

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Architecting ColdFusion For

Scalability And High Availability

Ryan Stewart

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Introduction

 Architecture & Clustering Options

Design an architecture and develop applications that scale linearly across multiple servers and handles failures gracefully.

 Performance Oriented Development

Getting the most out of a single server by optimizing your application code.

 Performance Tuning

ColdFusion server tuning and load testing.

 Monitoring

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Scalability

≠ High Availability

 Scalability - applications and architecture that will allow you to linearly

add servers and take on an increasing number of users.

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 Web server clustering

 Round Robin DNS, Hardware, Software

 ColdFusion Clustering (Application Level)

 Clustered instances, Connector clustering, session replication

 Database Server Clustering

 Database Specific

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 Create ColdFusion instances

 Cluster the instances

 Enable J2EE Sessions

 Connect your web server to the cluster

 Deploy your application

 Test

ColdFusion Clustering – simple example

Single Server Example

connector

CF Instance 1

CF Instance 2

Cluster Web server

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 ColdFusion J2EE installation is needed

 Using the cfusion instance on port 8300 create your instances

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 Create instance on the same server

 Register remote instances

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 Cluster the Instances

 Enable J2EE Sessions

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 After enabling session replication you will need to enable J2EE session

variables within the ColdFusion admin.

 Uses jsessionid in addition to CFID and CFTOKEN

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 ColdFusion web server connector clustering

 JRun Webserver Connector allows a webserver to communicate with

JRun, runs as a filter or plugin in the webserver

 Cluster by connecting multiple instances of ColdFusion to a single

webserver with the JRun Webserver Configuration Tool

 Load balancing and Failover built in to the connector

 Connector load balancing algorithms

(round-robin, weighted round-robin, weighted random)

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 JRun web server connector clustering

 Use wsconfig to connect your webserver to the cluster

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 Test sticky sessions

 Test failover

 Test session replication

 Identify which server is fulfilling your request

ColdFusion Clustering – Testing

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 Two or more web servers that support one or more domains are

grouped together as a cluster of servers

 Use Load balancing scheme to manage increases in load using

round-robin DNS or a hardware device

 Failover is used to protect against web server failures, implemented

using a hardware or software solution

Web Server Clustering - Overview

Web Server A Web Server B Web Server B Web Server Clustering Web Server Clustering CF Server A CF Server B Web Container Web Container Web ContainerServerJ2EE

Web ContainerServerJ2EE

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 Common hardware options

 F5 Big IP

 Cisco CSS (new ver Cisco ACE)

 Advantages

 Highly scalable

 Support probes

 Disadvantages

 Cost

 Can be difficult to configure

 Links

 CSS with CF -http://www.adobe.com/devnet/coldfusion/articles/css_multi.html

 F5 Big IP -http://www.adobe.com/devnet/coldfusion/j2ee/articles/balancing_j2ee.html

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 Windows Network Load Balancing (NLB)

 HAProxy (Unix only)

 http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1073-nuts-bolts-haproxy

 Speed. It’s really, really fast.

 It’s efficient. One of our instances is handling around 700 requests per second and using less than 5% CPU and only around 40MB of RAM on the Xen instance that it’s running on.

 It allows us to make configuration changes gracefully, without breaking any existing connections.

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Two server cluster with DNS round robin and CF cluster

 DNS Round robin handles distribution of load

 ColdFusion is clustered across two servers, session replication can be

enabled or disabled depending on needs.

 No web server failover but ColdFusion instances can be shutdown for

maintenance

Clustering Examples

www1.site.com Web Server A Web Server B Web Container Web Container Web ContainerServerCF Web ContainerServerCF www2.site.com Round Robin DNS www.site.com

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Two server cluster with software load balancing

 NLB or software solution handles web server load balancing and failover

 ColdFusion does not need to be clustered unless session replication is

needed.  http://www.adobe.com/devnet/coldfusion/articles/nlb_failover.html

Clustering Examples

Web Server A Web Server B Web Container Web Container Web ContainerServer BCF Web ContainerServer ACF Windows NLB software solution NLB Web Server A Web Server B Web Container Web Container Web ContainerServer BCF Web ContainerServer ACF HAProxy software solution Web ContainerWeb ContainerHAProxyServer

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Two server cluster with hardware load balancing

 Hardware solution handles web server load balancing and failover

 ColdFusion does not need to be clustered unless session replication is

needed.

Clustering Examples

Web Server A Web Server B Web Container Web Container Web ContainerServer BCF Web ContainerServer ACF Hardware solution With CF clustering Web ContainerWeb Container CSS Or BigIP Web Server A Web Server B Web Container Web Container Web ContainerServer BCF Web ContainerServer ACF Hardware solution Without CF clustering Web ContainerWeb Container CSS Or BigIP

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 If a failure occurs with a cluster member what do your users

experience?

 Handling user persistence across the cluster

 Session replication

 Creating your own persistence mechanism

Improving Availability

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 Create a robust architecture in a cloud environment with the ability to

add on demand servers. Do it without purchasing a single piece of hardware.

 Amazon Web services

 Ec2- Elastic Computing Cloud  S3 - Simple Storage Service

 Third party companies make it easier to get started on the cloud

 RightScale - deploy & scale applications in a turnkey architecture  Stax.net - develop & deploy

 Deployment

 Apache with Tomcat or JBoss  MySQL

 Archive ColdFusion Applications as a J2EE Archive

Clustering in the Clouds

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 Identifying, isolating and fixing bottlenecks during development

 Load testing features or specific areas during development

 Tuning Process

 Measuring Performance

 Focus on single user baseline performance  Load test for multi user performance

 What are the tunable  Application Code  ColdFusion settings

 Application server/JVM settings  Web Server/OS Settings

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 Single user testing

 Bottleneck testing and isolation with ColdFusion debugging  GetTickCount, CFTIMER

 Load Testing

 Small test scripts, no wait time

 Free tools available (OpenSTA, WebStress, ApacheBench)  Run single user tests within your browser during load tests

 Common areas to improve in your code

 Database queries  External Calls

 Caching (content & queries) - CF_Accelerate

Testing During Development

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ColdFusion Settings

 Simultaneous thread or active handler threads

 Template cache size

 Query cache size

 Trusted cache

Application Server settings

 JVM settings

 Garbage collection

 OS Specific tuning

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 JRun metrics  JVM Output  Network Monitoring  Disk IO monitoring  CPU monitoring  ColdFusion 8 Monitor

 Third party tools

 Fusion Reactor  See Fusion

 Database monitoring

 Profile in real time and identify queries by execution time and CPU time.

Monitoring Performance

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 Performance Monitoring in Production

 CF8 Monitor  See Fusion

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 Monitoring Production Servers

 ColdFusion probes – Debugging & Logging -> System Probes  Third party monitoring products (Nagios - open source)

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 Architecture & Clustering Options

Design an architecture and develop applications that scale linearly across multiple servers and handles failures gracefully.

 Performance Oriented Development

Getting the most out of a single server by optimizing your application code.

 Performance Tuning

ColdFusion server tuning and load testing.

 Monitoring

Tools and approaches for monitoring

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 Questions