Inside Coldfusion MX

Assuming that the launch of your application is successful, you'll see traffic patterns increase over time. The more that people attempt to use your application concurrently, the more likely you are to become concerned with the overall performance of that application.

There are many ways in which you can enhance the performance of an application after it's built. You can always revisit the hardware specifications, add members to a cluster, and conduct performance testing and analysis on your code to reduce bottlenecks.

Still, one of the cheapest, quickest, and most painless ways to immediately improve your application performance is also one of the most overlooked caching. Caching is an effective way to speed up access times on various sections of your site, reduce load on the database, and boost the throughput of your application as a whole.

ColdFusion provides you with a multitude of ways in which you can cache various portions of your application to increase performance. In this chapter, we'll examine some common caching strategies and discuss the performance improvement you can expect to see when implementing each one.