The usual setup is ColdFusion on either Windows with IIS or on Linux with Apache.

Both webservers are great webservers unless you get excessive load on them. At that time you wish that you had one server to do all the static files and one or more servers to do the ColdFusion requests.

Enter Nginx, the lightweight webserver written by Igor Sysoev. Nginx is one of the fastest webservers around and due to its different architecture will yawn at the load while Apache is already collapsing.

CF9 offers a nice new feature: the server.cfc.

The Server.cfc can be enabled in all CF editions to be called once the server starts. Much like a bootscript or the good'ol autoexec.bat from MS-DOS.

We use Memcached a lot for our projects and always had the problem that each CF server spawned multiple connections to the memcached server. This was because at startup there were already dozens of requests waiting and they all fired in the very same second.