Making my coldfusion app available on an intranet???

is there any way to totally change the URL so that it reads like

 http://tool.cfm ?

No. You have to go somewhere to get to the application. You at LEAST would need the following:

http://computerName/tool.cfm

But there is no way for you to do the following:

http://tool.cfm

alternatively, you could edit the hosts file on everyone's computer to contain the line:

127.whatever.your.ip.is  <this is supposed to be a tab> doubleclick.net


then you get an easy to remember domain name for your application and the added benefit of a reduction in advertising.

True, you could do that as long as your edited EVERYONES host file. So basically you're giving them an alias to your IP address or computerName. It's a good point, but you still can't do this:

http://tool.cfm

wow that was a dumb question i should have just tried that...thank you very much...at what point does performance get bad when talking about size of the database?

as long as you set your db up right, it shouldn't ever perform bad..

of course, that depends on what the DB is.  for example, SQL Server will perform much better than MS Access.

You should be fine up into the Gigabytes as long as you properly index your tables and are VERY careful about creating optimized queries. You'll want to take all of your queries (one at a time) and put them into Query Analyser and do an Index Analysis to determine if you have set them up correctly (you can't do this until you have a fair amount of data in the DB so that it knows what fields need indexing and what the costs of doing so will be).

If you have any code that queries a recordset, then loops through it running another query for each row returned, then you've got some work to do. You'll need to remedy all of those with mroe complex queries.

If you're not using CFQUERYPARAM on all of your queries, you'll need to change that too. It allows the DB to remember that a similar query was run.

If you're using Access... then you'll need to start using SQL Server or Oracle. Access will NOT cut it for a large DB.

You'll want to start getting familiar with stored procedures.

And with a large database usually comes a large quantity of data. SO make sure that your queries ONLY return the data that is needed (no extra rows, no extra columns). Do a search on "SELECT *" and get rid of every instance, replace it with a list of neccesary columns.

So in short, how much you can handle is determined by the specs of the server, and how well you wrote your code. A few pieces of innefficient code can bring a GigaByte DB server to it's knees very quickly.

Be sure to read the following post on other Optimization Techniques:

https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/20542979/Cold-Fusion-Optimization-Techniques.html