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Searchable storage with document upload and download
Coldfusion can index documents and PDF books using Verity/Solr, natively work with images using CFImage tag and functions, and even work with MP3 tags with some Java magic. This makes Coldfusion great tool for creating searchable file storage - say, for your workgroup fileserver.
Problem
Getting metadata and organizing database is pretty straightforward task. Problem came from it wasn't expected - downloading large files failed every and each time.
Analysis
File download using CFContent tag is a one-liner:
<cfcontent file="c:/somefile.avi" />
or, to make download prettier and hide original file name:
<cfheader name="Content-Disposition" value="attachment; filename="someothername.avi" /> <cfcontent file="c:/somefile.avi" />
It appeared, however, that this small piece of code is very resource-hungry. First I downloaded couple of 100MB audio files. They had downloaded without any problems. Then I tried to load 1GB video file and all I saw was "Error 500 - Service Unavailable". Coldfusion was taking about 450MB of RAM and there was no other connections. Look at memory graph:
After Coldfusion service restart, it was same story: large file was not coming through:
To help Coldfusion a little, I raised Maximum JVM Heap Size (MB) value in CF Administrator from default 512MB to 768MB. Not helped.
This tried on Coldfusion 9.0.0.251028 (first official release) on Windows Vista machine with 2 processor cores and 2GB of RAM. Tested both Coldfusion J2EE installation on Glassfish server and on clean 'out-of-the-box' Coldfusion install (JRun). Tested also on IIS and Apache as web-server. Results were similar on every test.
In conclusion
I didn't succeed using CFContent to download 1GB+ files and looking for alternative. I reluctant to say this, but Railo 3.1 installation on Tomcat 6 easily allowed 1GB file to download - just memory consumtion rose from 37MB to 42MB...
Links
http://www.bennadel.com/blog/1228-Eric-Stevens-On-CFContent-And-Memory-Usage-In-ColdFusion-8.htm