CFC Component Instantiation overhead and dependencies

Posted At : September 14, 2006 9:10 PM | Posted By : Mark Lynch
Related Categories: Software Architecture, ColdFusion

I've been working on a ColdFusion application that makes really heavy use of application cached CFC components which are all inited in the application.cfc. This makes for a very high performance application and the components currently have inter-relations based on the fact that each component knows that any dependencies will be available in the application scope.

This works well for the main application where performance is the critical measure, however it is not very flexible when it comes to creating an admin application that used the same core libraries but where having each component cached in the application is wasteful of resource.

I'm currently exploring to see if it's possible to get the best of both worlds:

Runtime dependency handling (guaranteeing that components dependencies are available)
Caching components to ensure we don't have the overhead of instantiating them multiple times.

To discover the what the overhead of instantiating a component is I ran the following tests.

10000 iterations
Large component (45 functions)	T1	T2	T3	Average
Create component each time	17438	11766	12010	13738
Re use component	6952	7240	8440	7544
Small component (1 functions)	T1	T2	T3	Average
Create component each time	9059	9557	8644	9087
Re use component	5950	7238	5873	6354

What do these numbers mean?

For a large component up to 45% of the time was spent creating instances

For the small component 30% of the time was spent creating instances

What this shows is that it is definitely worth minimising component instantiation in performance critical applications, as between 30 - 45% of time could be spend instantiating the component (if it not reused).

Stay tuned for a solution to instantiating and caching components.

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