Trying Fusion Reactor

One of my ongoing projects has 16,000 registered users. Certain conditions can cause a high percentage of those users to come to the site in one day.

At some points in the past, this has caused the site to drag. I have since made adjustments to the site, and we haven't seen the issue since.

Tracking down the cause of the performance problem proved difficult, however, as I had limited data to use in finding the problem.

The number of users on the site continues to grow, so the ability to track down performance problems will continue to become more important.

There are now two products on the market to help ColdFusion developers track performance metrics on their site, SeeFusion and Fusion Reactor. I chose Fusion Reactor because, well, I won it in Ray's coding contest (declared a draw).

I had our server administrator install Fusion Reactor (which he tells me was very easy to do). We then had to fix a server problem due to a currupted Verity Collection (this sems to happen to me from time-to-time, does anyone else have this problem?). Once we got that taken care of, Fusion Reactor was up and running.

So far, I have just been looking at the Request History. This provides quite a bit of information about each request. The information that concerns me on this report, however, is the number of milliseconds to process the page. I would like to see information about the queries running on the page, but I have to set up the JDBC Wrapper in order to do that. Fortunately, the instructions look easy. So perhaps I will find time to try that out tomorrow.

Another feature that I look forward to trying is the QZip compression. This could save us bandwidth and improve perceived performance as well.

So far, I am impressed with how easy it has been to get Fusion Reactor running. I look forward to trying out more features in the future.