Blog of Dave

At the company I work for, we are forced to live with and support a legacy application built on a framework that I personally just despise.  It is a homegrown framework that breaks every rule of what a framework should be.  Not only does it do far more than a framework should do in my opinion, it does it with *terrible* inefficiency.  To make matters worse, this application has remote DSNs (and I mean *remote* all over the internet) which make troubleshooting a real chore.  Since its deployment it has been a dog, with page loads sometimes taking 4-5 seconds for work that certainly shouldn't take that long.  We recently added a customer with about 40,000 users and it pushed us way over the ledge.  Sometimes the application will just dive into an unrecoverable tail spin with threads filling up and never clearing out.  We have tried countless attempts to correct the application the best we knew how including tuning the JVM based on lots of research and looking though stack traces, etc., but have never gotten it quite right.  Yesterday as the application crashed we finally recognized that we just weren't getting the job done and needed to call the experts.  We have been following the Reactor email list and have noted the help that Mike Brunt from Webapper has offered in regards to some performance issues.  I decided to give Mike a call and see if we could contract them to help us find the killers.  He put me in contact with Patrick Quinn who I spoke with at length regarding their approach and services, and he was able to line up one of his sharp shooters named Daryl Banttari within a couple of hours.  Daryl immediately installed SeeFusion (which we are purchasing today no doubt) and went to work troubleshooting.  He found a number of issues and within 4 hours had the system stabilized.  As traffic ramped up again this morning he worked with us again and even tweaked a bit further and it is now running stable and remarkably faster than it ever has.  We are watching the threads come and go now without ever getting close to the max and watching the garbage collection work better than we could have ever achieved on our own.  This was by far the best money that we have ever spent on any kind of consulting whatsoever, and the guys at Webapper are a real pleasure to work with.  If you ever find yourself in this position, I urge you to contact them as I am fairly certain they are as talented as anyone in the business at doing perfomance tuning of ColdFusion applications.