ColdFusion Muse

Can Performance Suffer With Cfqueryparam?

I heard an excellent presentation by CF giant Charlie Arehart yesterday. It was one of the "unconference" sessions title CfMythbusters. Later that day I was priveledged to share the mic with Charlie and talk bout CF Troubleshooting. Anyway, while discussing cfqueryparam Charlie said something that made me sit up a bit and say "huh?". It has long been the contention of myself and others that the use of Cfqueryparam benefits both security and performance when used against an RDBMS like SQL server or Oracle. While this is a generalization it usually holds true. Charlie, however, illustrated to me a case where cfqueryparam might be detrimental to performance and he was so convincing I thought I would share it with you.

NOTE: Check out the comments for some cavaets and opposing viewpoints. Also note that the tip on constants may not hold water. See this discussion on Brad Wood's blog for more insight on that item

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Max Monday General: Maria Shriver Stealls the Show

Well I just got out of the first general session. As usual Kevin Lynch had lots of goodies to show us. From Internet enabled phone running the full version of Flash 10 to cool community widgets for sharing screens. But the real show stopper was that Maria Shriver stopped by and spoke for about 10 minutes regarding her California Legacy Trails project - a new feature of the california museums web site. She was charming and unscripted. Referring to the information presented by Kevin she said something like "I didn't understand anything that was just presented... I thought I had stubmled onto a star trek convention. But when I realized that the crowd was 90 percent men I figured I would stay." She was very fun and we enjoyed hearing her.

Checking the Size of the Spool Directory on Windows

If you ever send out a few tens of thousands of messages using CF you know the spool directory can get pretty crowded. If you are like me you sometimes want to keep an eye on it as those messages clear out to make sure there is nothing funky going on. If you use Windows Explorer this can be a maddening experience. Windows doesn't just retrieve a count of files. It retrieves the entire file list and meta data and it redraws the explorer window. When you have 50k messages in the spool folder it can take 10 to 30 seconds just for Windows to refresh the count so you can know how many were added or deleted to the folder.

Instead, I use a little tool called "t4edirsize" from tools 4 Ever. I have a "show spool" batch file on my servers that looks like this:

The output gives me all sorts of information including the number of files in the directory - but it usually only takes 50-200 milliseconds to run. Tools 4 ever command line tools along with Sys-Internals tools (now owned by Microsoft) like "pslist" and "pskill" are essential to your arsenal as a troubleshooter.