[thesite] if anyones bored..

[.jeff]

joshua,

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> From: Joshua Olson
>
> Underpinnings aside, a huge majority of the time spend
> on rendering the homepage falls into two tasks:
>
> 1. Querying the information
> 2. Generating the screen display
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well, in general terms, that's what a huge majority of time of *any* page is
spent doing.  getting more specific though is identifying what's being
queried and generating display on the screen.  some of the time incurred in
rendering the homepage is time spent also rendering other pages on the site.
there also the time penalties for includes and custom tags that would need
to be accounted for as well as all the calculations that happen in
application.cfm for each request.  in order for it to be a fair comparison
it couldn't be the current cms versus a flat page request.

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> With the current Evolt CMS I know that there are a few
> items that happen with every page request (such as
> session state management, 404 management, etc), and I'm
> sure you could isolate how long those items are taking
> to complete and remove them from the comparison.
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simply calculating their impact on the total and then taking the different
as the processing time for the rest would be naive.  there's no telling how
much the time of the remainder would be affected if the portions removed
from the total time never took place to begin with.

for example, there's lots of calculations for session state management that
happens in application.cfm.  that's there so that content display can make
choices about what's displayed to the end user with respect to their level
of authorization.  in order for it to be a fair comparison, the php version
would need to do this as well.

these sorts of dependencies are throughout the site.  that's why simply
making a php page that queries the information and renders it onscreen
wouldn't be a valid comparison.

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> Part of me is convinced that a PHP version of the
> homepage might run a whole lot faster than the CF
> version that's there now.  Mind you, I'm not suggesting
> that evolt change platforms, but lately I have been
> having doubts as to CF's processing power, but I do
> not know enough PHP to make that version myself.
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the total processing time is not the total equation for the power of an
application server.  you must also take into account the speed with which
you can develop and maintain the application.  while php may win the
rendering time race, i'm quite certain it would lose the development and
maintenance time races -- especially where less experienced developers (cf
or php) are concerned.

thanks,

.jeff

http://evolt.org/
jeff at members.evolt.org
http://members.evolt.org/jeff/