Does ColdFusion need 64 bit Support? Short answer: Yes!

Posted At : December 20, 2006 11:31 AM
Related Categories: ColdFusion,Adobe

Does ColdFusion need 64 bit support? The short answer to this question is yes, but it really depends on the ROI if Adobe charges more for the 64 bit version.

My company is currently in the process of upgrading to 64 bit servers, but only where it makes sense.

SQL Server 2005 has a 32 bit and a 64 bit version. The 64 bit version takes advantage of the 64 bit chips, but it also costs a lot more. Factor in the cost of the 64 bit version of Windows 2003 Server OS, and it gets pricey.

From my tests with SSIS on this new hardware, ETLs that used to take hours now take minutes to run. Granted a lot of the speed improvements have come from code optimizations in SQL Server, but there is still a huge improvement from using the 64 bit hardware.

It would be nice to see 64 bit version of ColdFusion. I know it would require having a 64 bit OS and JVM, but it would be nice to see ColdFusion take advantage of this new hardware.

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Damon Cooper's Gravatar Which 64-bit OS/VM combo would you use? The main one we're lookig at at the moment is Solaris with the Sun 64-bit VM.

Damon
# Posted By Damon Cooper | 12/20/06 12:44 PM
John Lyons's Gravatar redhat 64bit support would be nice
# Posted By John Lyons | 12/20/06 1:43 PM
Peter's Gravatar RHEL.

And IMHO it's silly to charge more for a software product only because it can utilize the RAM you've already paid for.

Can't see no enterprize in that.
# Posted By Peter | 12/20/06 1:59 PM
John Lyons's Gravatar To be honest I would like to see expanded distro support in general. Centos is downstream from RHEL and runs the same RPMs. Ubuntu would be another Distro deserving an offcially supported tag.
# Posted By John Lyons | 12/20/06 2:04 PM
Damon Cooper's Gravatar RHEL on which chipset and which supported 64-bit VM?

Thanks
# Posted By Damon Cooper | 12/20/06 2:14 PM
Damon Cooper's Gravatar You'll need an app server which supports the 64-bit JVM and the chipset you select, if deploying CF on a J2EE server.

right now that slendor combination of 64-bit chipset + 64-bit OS + 64-bit J2EE server + 64-bit JVM is fairly slender, where everything is officially supported. (Which is why I'm asking)

Thanks!
# Posted By Damon Cooper | 12/20/06 2:32 PM
Andrew Powell's Gravatar The J2EE server is the key. I know there are some 64-bit app servers out there, but JRun is not currently one of them.
# Posted By Andrew Powell | 12/20/06 3:26 PM
Joseph Spaur's Gravatar FYI, Windows for 64bit doesn't cost any more than for 32 (<a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/howtobu...">http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/howtobu...</a>).And Sql Server from what I can tell is also the same (<a href="http://www.microsoft.com/sql/howtobuy/default.mspx...">http://www.microsoft.com/sql/howtobuy/default.mspx...</a>. The other thing on the performance of SSIS btw, is that they're likely running on different processors. So not only do you have the ability to address into more memory, you're also likely benefiting from better instruction sets on proc itself.
# Posted By Joseph Spaur | 12/20/06 3:56 PM
Adrian J. Moreno's Gravatar Deploy ColdfusionMX on JBoss instead of JRun and you've got 64-bit support.
# Posted By Adrian J. Moreno | 12/20/06 4:49 PM
John's Gravatar I did not think Jboss was officially supported.
# Posted By John | 12/20/06 5:08 PM
David Fekke's Gravatar John,

You are correct that JBoss is not supported by Adobe for ColdFusion. Adobe does use JBoss internally, so you never know, they may support JBoss at some point.

It is not enough to run ColdFusion on a 64 bit JVM, ColdFusion would have a 64 bit version to take advantage of the hardware-OS-JVM-J2EE 64 bit combination.

David.
# Posted By David Fekke | 12/21/06 9:16 AM
Damon Cooper's Gravatar JBoss support is something that's on our radar, as is 64-bit Sun JVM support for Solaris for CF, fyi.

Other platform/configs TBD. So if I understand this thread properly, RHEL 64 on AMD64 with Sun's 64-bit JVM is interesting to folks, presumably with either JBOSS or CF/JRun.

Thanks guys.

Damon
# Posted By Damon Cooper | 12/21/06 1:19 PM
John's Gravatar Jrun64 that would be very nice.
# Posted By John | 12/21/06 2:28 PM
Cutter's Gravatar Damon, 64 bit CF would be nice, period. I don't want it on one platform, I want it on my (insert yours here) platform. I'm sick of having 8gig of RAM, with a JVM that will only utilize 2gig tops. More Power!
# Posted By Cutter | 12/21/06 3:58 PM
Damon Cooper's Gravatar I understand your perspective, but in the engineering world, "64 bit" rubber meets the road on specific platforms....the bootom line is that there are very few actual combinations of 64-bit VM and 64-bit OS's on mainstream chipsets today.

Hence my question of "what 64-bit platform combo are you / do you want to be running?".
# Posted By Damon Cooper | 12/21/06 5:22 PM
John's Gravatar Hence my question of "what 64-bit platform combo are you / do you want to be running?".

CentOS(RHEL) 64, AMD64, Suns64 JVM, Jboss App Server
# Posted By John | 12/22/06 2:24 PM
Hans's Gravatar Proc: Intel Xeon 5000 series
OS: Ubuntu 6.06.1+, CentOS 4.4+, RHEL 4.4+
JVM: Sun JDK 1.4.2, Sun JDK 5.0, Sun JDK 6
J2EE: Tomcat 5.5+, JBoss (including CF Standard, as an alternative to integrated JRun!!!)
# Posted By Hans | 3/14/07 9:16 PM
John's Gravatar We have BL35p's with AMD64 processors running SLES 10 64. We are currently running JRun4 on these machines with the 32bit Java 1.5 JVM and ColdFusion MX 7 on top of that. Obviously this is a non-supported config and it would be nice if support was extended to this config, and more importantly a 64bit JVM on the same platform. There is some Java 1.5 code in our application so we were forced to use an unsupported config from the start in order to use both that code and ColdFusion.
# Posted By John | 5/17/07 8:43 PM
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