PiBox

When I installed CFML on a Raspberry Pi, top performance was really the least of my worries.  I'm using ContentBox Modular CMS which allowed me to get this site up and running (via the CommandBox CLI) literally in about 30 minutes after booting a Raspberry Pi for the first time in my life.  

This was incredibly easy and the site performs great for a single page page load with its in-memory H2 database.  Hitting the home page locally loads in less than 200ms.  Of course, ContentBox is a full-fledged CMS running on Hibernate ORM with theming support, dynamic content rendering, and modular plugins.  It's not necessarily optimized for an embedded device.  However, I'm still able to get about 15 requests a second to a ContentBox page which is a decent amount of traffic.

Since I was feeling adventurous, I posted this blog on Reddit. I used the word "ColdFusion' in the title knowing full well the knee-jerk reaction many people have with the hopes it would spark some good discussion. That's also why I added an "About CFML" page to the site.  I've been enjoying some good conversation, though I'm generally disappointed at the lopsided attention given to performance above all things.  

To "prove" to me how slow CFML is, several of the Reddit readers launched a DOS attack on my Pi with load testing tools.

In my previous two posts, I showed how I added live CPU usage and Memory usage to my blog layout to let people see how my Raspberry Pi is holding up hosting a CFML site.  There's one more stat I wanted to add and that is a hit counter so you know how many requests have been served in the last hour.  Since there's no web server logs to parse, I added a simple counter in CFML.  

Please welcome the newest CFML site on the Internet.  This one's a little different though because it's running on a $35 device called a Raspberry Pi 2.  These newer versions have 1GB of RAM and a 900MHz quad-core CPU.  The CMS in use is ContentBox Modular CMS and is running on the embedded server of CommandBox (Undertow and Railo Lucee).