CFSwitch Hunt

We made an interesting discovery in a recent consulting engagement, and we wanted to share what we found with the community. The gist of what we found is that cfswitch, with a string expression, and especially under load, runs dramatically slower than the equivalent cfif-cfelseif-cfelse block. Here''s what happened...

A customer purchased one of our one day remote consulting engagements. They reported an intermittent performance problem that they were unable to pin down. They were already a SeeFusion customer, so we used SeeFusion to generate stack traces on the running requests. This line showed up quite often in the traces we took:

  "jrpp-27" prio=5 tid=0x09572cb0 nid=0x12d4 runnable [5da2f000..5da2fdb8]
    at java.lang.FloatingDecimal.readJavaFormatString(Unknown Source)
    at java.lang.Double.parseDouble(Unknown Source)  

Elsewhere in the stack traces we saw evidence of cfswitch usage. So we did some further digging, and sure enough, the customer was using cfswitch tags inside query loops--not an uncommon practice at all. But the switch expressions were all strings. So here''s the kicker. Under the covers, ColdFusion attempts to convert the switch expression to a floating point number, using Java''s parseDouble method. If the conversion works, then ColdFusion uses the expression as a number. If the conversion fails, however, then an exception is thrown, and an exception stack is generated, but then ColdFusion handles the exception and uses the expression as a string. The problem is, that exception throwing and stack generation gets very, very expensive under load.

We cooked up some tests to verify, and sure enough, on average the performance difference between cfswitch with string expressions, and the equivalent cfif-cfelseif-cfelse blocks, was a 10-fold difference. Under load, that will multiply dramatically.

We had the customer convert their cfswitch blocks, and they had an immediate improvement in performance and stability. There were other things left to tune, but this was a primary culprit.

We also found evidence that the floating point conversion might be single-threaded, which would make matters even worse. But the evidence for this wasn''t clear, and there also appeared to be some variation across different VM versions, but we had to move on to other things and couldn''t pursue this other point.

Moral of the story--only use numeric expressions for cfswitch! Otherwise, use equivalent cfif-cfelseif-cfelse blocks. And this is especially true if your code will be running under heavy load.

Test files