User manual MACROMEDIA COLDFUSION 4.5-ADMINISTRING COLDFUSION SERVER

[. . . ] Administering ColdFusion Server ColdFusion 4. 5 Allaire Corporation Copyright Notice © 1999 Allaire Corporation. This manual, as well as the software described in it, is furnished under license and may be used or copied only in accordance with the terms of such license. The content of this manual is furnished for informational use only, is subject to change without notice, and should not be construed as a commitment by Allaire Corporation. Allaire Corporation assumes no responsibility or liability for any errors or inaccuracies that may appear in this book. [. . . ] After you do so, you need to capture and analyze the load testing results and report the statistics to the development team. From there, you'll need to reach consensus about what are the most serious problems you discovered, what are the necessary changes to make, and what is the best way to implement the fixes. After the changes are made and a new build of the application is available, you'll rerun the tests to look for performance improvements. Again, you'll reanalyze the testing results and continue this cycle until the site is operating within the established parameters that you've set. When your team agrees that the site scales well and is operating at peak performance under heavy stress, you're ready to deploy the application into a production environment. Load testing considerations Before starting your load testing, consider the following: · Define benchmarks early Make sure you understand your Web site's performance and scalability requirements before you start running tests against your site. Otherwise, you won't know what you're testing for and the statistics you capture won't have significance. Also, remember that the benchmarks you define should be customized for the current application; don't simply reuse benchmarks from an earlier site on which you may have worked. Each Web application is often distinct in terms of its design, construction, backoffice integration, and user experience requirements. · Ensure the test environment mirrors the production environment Create a test environment that is identical as much as possible to the actual production environment in which the Web site will be hosted. If you don't simulate a similar network and bandwidth scenario, or use the same types of servers, or ensure that the same versions of software (operating system, service packs, Web server, and third-party tools) reside on both the test and production 144 Administering ColdFusion Server servers, you can't anticipate problems nor determine why they occur. The number of possibilities would be too large. · Minimize distributed environment load testing Load testing in a distributed environment can be problematic if the network on which you are performing your load tests becomes congested, resulting in poor response times. Additionally, if everyone else in the organization is using that network for their everyday activities, such as e-mail, source control, and file management, an increased load going over the network will likely cause significant network degradation for them. As they likely have nothing to do with the testing effort, this situation can cause great frustration. In such a scenario, it may be more effective to physically sit in front of the server on which the application resides and perform the tests locally rather than bring the entire LAN or WAN to a slow crawl. Also, by testing locally, you are better able to rule out the network as the source of the scalability problems. Alternatively, you may be able to configure a separate subnet on the LAN or WAN that is distinct from the subnet on which everybody else in your environment uses network services. You should now have a good overview of what scalability implies, the core elements that comprise it, some of the issues that affect successful implementations, and the tasks that must be performed to verify that your Web applications are able to achieve satisfactory scalability. The next section describes Web site availability and reliability concepts and considerations. What is Web Site Availability? As you've already learned from the previous section, it's critical to design, develop, test, and deploy your Web applications so that they can scale well under heavy and everincreasing load. However, the reality is that in spite of the best-laid plans and preparations, servers can fail for seemingly unknown reasons, causing your site to become unavailable. If and when a server fails or becomes overloaded, regardless of why it has, you want to ensure that it won't adversely affect your business by preventing your customers from accessing and using your Web application. If it does, you risk jeopardizing your bottom line with lost sales and disgruntled customers who will look to your competitors' products for goods and services. [. . . ] To add groups select the group(s) and click Add. For our example, let's assume all the MARS developer's are in a MARS group which you add to the policy. Now all members of this group can access the resources that are members of the MARS policy. Now do the same for the VENUS directory. 2. 3. Okay now each group of users has access to the resources which are members of that policy. [. . . ]