CF network design

[mad01]

I know that the 3-tier is the best design for database driven sites(web server,application server, DB server) but what I would like to know is there a big difference between having the web and the application servers on the same machine(server) or seprate machines...what I wanna know is what is the best network design for a dynamic CF website.

thanks in advance mad01

 

[CFDude]

Well, its extremely difficult to separate CF from being on the web server itself. I've never really seen this as an advantage -- just more hardware to deal with.

If you are needing to scale, then CF Enterprise with its clustering capabilities is what you may need, but this not be what you are looking for.

You'll definately want to keep the DB on its own server. The next step is your coding methodology -- there are many ways to do this with CF. Fusebox is a popular one and I have used it, but I am indifferent towards. Check it out at

http://www.fusebox.org

HTH,
Tim P.

 

[GunJack]

I agree with Tim in that I see no advantage in separating CF from the main webserver. If you get to the point of requiring load balancing/failover, I would reccomend hardware based products such as the Cisco local director. I've found this to be a great solution for loadbalancing and has other benefits as well.

Good luck,
GJ

 

[mad01]

thanks Tim & GJ
mad01

 

[Silvano]

I tend to disagree with GunJack here. I have noticed delays and additional strain that application can put on the machine and degrade the performance. After some additional research I have found that Macromedia in their documentation suggests that expecting that one computer do all the tasks associated with a Web site will most likely be too much. To correct this problem, they recommend that separate severs for ColdFusion and the Web server, the database, e-mail, and so on should be run. In addition, ColdFusion application server is very capable to handle database connectivity options and throughput, load balancing and fail-over, supports several OS and Web servers, and security options are well covered. I suggest that you go to macromedia site and do the search on “clustering”. You will get about 200 articles on this topic. Sylvano
dsylvano@hotmail.com