I am just running through the presentation that I will be giving at cfObjective ANZ which will show the new world of caching we have gained in ColdFusion 9.0.1 in particular.  So much is going on in the world of enterprise level caching, memcached is a particularly successful example of this and EHCACHE - Terracotta are certainly no slouches.  One very important point to bear in mind, caching is a way of improving performance and if it does not do that, then we are simply adding a management layer for no good reasons, so please load test before deployment to production.

In ColdFusion, although we have had caching for many years it, was typically difficult to manage, I actually wrote a piece on caching in CF. We are only just at the beginning of realizing the full benefits of EHCACHE and there have been several good articles by Aaron West and Rob Brooks-Bilson which focus on the use of EHCACHE at the code level, we are focusing on the server-side capabilities which are considerable.

At cfObjective in Melbourne I will be running through the basic capabilities of running EHCACHE in an "out of process" mode; this is where we enter the enterprise caching space.  By default, EHCACHE runs "in process", in the same JVM heap space as ColdFusion, this brings me to a caveat, be careful how heavily you use EHCACHE in a 32-bit system, there is only one memory space.  Our "out of process" test so far are conducted using the following hardware and software. 

ColdFusion 9.0.1 Enterprise multiple instance install, with two instances running on Windows 7 64-bit IIS7 on the same machine EHCACE 2.2 running on two virtual machines using VMware running Windows 2003 Server.  EHCACHE is clustered and replicated using Terracotta. 

The presentation will be very practical, or that is our aim at least.  We will run a series of load tests with caching both off and on and we will fail-over EHCACHE whilst the test is running and then fail back. As will be demonstrated, EHCACHE fails over very quickly.  We will also mention some "gotcha's" with EHCACHE in its current mode of use in ColdFusion.

I look forward to meeting those who can make it to cfObjective, in Melbourne.