Recently I was involved in a project which involved completely re-engineering several commercial ColdFusion web sites involved in auto-racing events. Here in this blog we have discussed all the steps needed to ensure success and over a recent major auto racing event those steps were vindicated with a faultless performance during the event.  Hopefully there will be a detailed white paper at some point showing exactly what was done; here is an overview of what we did.

• Upgraded from ColdFusion 8 to ColdFusion 9.
• Upgraded from 32-bit to 64-bit architecture.
• Increased from 2 to 5 CF-web servers.
• Upgraded from SQL Server 2005 to 2008, from compatibility mode 80 to 100.
• Introduced SQL Server Active-Passive mirroring.
• The new SQL Server boxes had three dedicated RAID arrays to mitigate disk I/O.
• Reviewed network hardware and upgraded.
• Refactored slow SQL as identified by a SeeFusion/DBA.
• Refactored slow ColdFusion code as identified by SeeFusion.
• Load tested the applications repeatedly as we iterated through the changes.

The net result was an infrastructure that faultlessly handled a peak of over 48,000 concurrent users.  Kudos to both the client team and Webapper, who with the help of SeeFusion, engineered the whole thing and of course ColdFusion 9.  

We definitely have a product that is scaleable in CF9 providing we plan accordingly and test repeatedly.