Note: This blog post is from 2011. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

My session will be "CF911 ColdFusion Performance Report 2011", a new talk/concept I've created. Here's the description:

Starting a new tradition, veteran CF troubleshooter Charlie Arehart will present a review of the performance aspects of making various choices when working with ColdFusion, especially in recent version(s) of ColdFusion. Leveraging the important value of real load testing (as opposed to the less accurate conclusions from "large loop" testing), Charlie's annual report will help attendees appreciate the performance-related improvements of new/changed features, as well some older features where choices can make an important impact. Depending on the timing of the release of "CF next", the session may cover its new features, but it will certainly cover some things new in CF 9 and 9.0.1.

As I note there, I hope this may become an annual event which I might present at this and/or other conferences. (It's an idea rooted in a similar presentation made by a former colleague, from my first IT career from 1982-1997, where he presented the annual "Jim Damon model 204 Performance Report".)

About RIACon

As for RIAcon, I hope you're considering it. Phil Nacelli and the folks at AboutWeb have been working hard to put together the conference, which in some minds is kind of picking up where CFUnited left off. It will be a more intimate event, much like CFunited was when it first started.

Indeed, some will recognize that the location for RIAcon is across the street from one of the hotels where CFunited was held in its early years, right next to the Twinbrook Metro station in Rockville, MD.

A Personal Connection to the Hotel Location

Even more of a delight for me personally is that the hotel (The Legacy Hotel) is right on the land that was once the location of Congressional Roller Skating Rink (until the late 70's), where my sister and I (and many friends) spent our teen years pretty much whenever we weren't in school. Yep, I was a skating nerd: dance, figures, freestyle, and more. Here's incriminating evidence!

Note: This blog post is from 2011. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

Here are the details.

First are the two talks:

• Pinpointing and Resolving ColdFusion Performance Issues (see the link for details on the topic)
• More Hidden Gems in CFBuilder and CFBuilder 2 (see the link for details on the topic)

(I had put in just the first talk originally, and then a few weeks ago a slot opened and they asked if I could do the other, which I was happy to offer, as an reprisal/update to my talk from the first release.)

Then for the Lightning Round (or what was originally referred to as the Pecha Kucha), my talk will be:

• Lies, damned lies, and CF request timeouts (in which I'll share in 5 minutes some information that even experienced developers admit having never known)

Finally, for the Birds of a Feather (no page on their site listing them yet), the session I will be leading will be:

• CF911: Share your CF server troubleshooting tips (come share some ideas, or learn from myself and others)

Sense a theme? Yep, other than the CFBuilder talk, the other sessions are all focused on the topic that is now most near and dear to my heart (and livelihood): CF Server Troubleshooting. It's what I do, and more important it's how I feel I can best help the most people.

There's one last aspect of my involvement at the conference that I'll mention: they started a new sponsorship program this year called "Friends of cf.Objective()", and I'll be participating in that. No mention of it yet on their site, but there should be more news at the event.

So hope to see you there, or if you won't be there, I'll post if any of these are recorded, or if not then I would likely record them myself in the future.

Note: This blog post is from 2011. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

What's changed about IIS 7 support in 9.01?

Some folks will know that ColdFusion 9 Updater 1 (9.0.1) has finally added full support for IIS 7, without need to rely upon enabling IIS 6 Compatibility (which IS still required for CF 9.0, 8.0, and 8.0.1). This is indeed great news, whether you're running on Vista, Windows 7, or Windows Server 2008, which all have IIS 7 by default, and for which you can enable IIS 6 Compatibility mode, but it's not on by default and not always straightforward to enable.

So bottom line, if you're on 9.0.1, you no longer need to go through the hoops described in the CF9 Admin/Install docs (nor in helpful blog entries like here and here, though those are still great for those running on CF 9.0 and 8, and may even offer tips of value to anyone setting up CF to run on IIS, which has other challenges on Server 2008.)

Gotcha 1: The IIS 7 Compatibility change is NOT documented where expected

Sadly, though, if you go looking for help on this in the CF docs, such as Chapter 6 of the manual, Installing ColdFusion 9, you will find that it has NOT been updated with the info that is new in the updater.

It opens, "If you are configuring IIS 7 ... ensure that you have the options IIS Metabase and IIS 6 configuration compatibility ... and ISAPI Extensions ... selected".

What a shame.

Solution 1: Where the change IS documented

So with respect to change in 9.0.1, where you no longer need to enable IIS 6 compatibility, the details are covered instead in the installation guide that was created just for installing CF9 updater 1 itself, called "Installing the Coldfusion 9 Update", available online at:

http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/coldfusion/901/cf901install.pdf

It's certainly reasonable to expect that the primary install manual would have been updated with the info above.

But that's why I'm pointing this out. I have also added a comment explaining it on the page pointed to in the first link above. Hope that may help someone.

(The same info is also offered as a chapter in the manual, "ColdFusion 9 Updater 1: New Feature Notes", available at http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/coldfusion/901/cf901features.pdf, which is of course very interesting if you may have missed it.)

I'll explain the second gotcha in a follow-up blog entry.

Note: This blog post is from 2011. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

I'll detail the limits per version/edition below.

I'll also offer a (possibly surprising) workaround that can allow you to get even more requests through IIS, even for a single web site.

(Before I elaborate on that, note that there is a separate issue if you're finding that CF doesn't let you see more than 25 requests at once. That's instead due to a setting in CF/JRun, the maxworkerthreads setting. For more on that, see this blog entry.)

That said, this is a problem which could affect anyone regardless of the app server they may be running behind IIS. (And yes, I do realize that for some, the answer to this problem will be, "see, that's another reason to run Apache." We get that. Let's just focus on this problem for those who choose/have to remain on IIS.)

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Note: This blog post is from 2010. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

Here's the next, related, myth:

True or False: "If/when I apply Cumulative Hotfixes, I need apply only the latest CHF, right?"

For instance, let's say you're currently running CF 9 update 1 or CF 8.0.1 and discover (perhaps due to my last blog entry) that you had never applied any of their associated CHFs. It would seem you should just be able to apply the latest CHF and not bother with anything related to the previous ones, right?

Answer: Well, yes and no.

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Note: This blog post is from 2010. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

First myth up for consideration:

True or false: "If/when I download CF to install it from scratch, the installer has all the latest fixes (updaters, at least)"

Answer: False (generally). For instance, if you download CF9 today (Dec 2010), you still get CF 9.0, released originally in Oct 2009. You don't get the latest updater (9.0.1 as of this writing, released July 2010), though its existence is at least mentioned on the page, nor of course does it then include any hotfixes or cumulative hotfixes.

Why not, you may wonder? I'll explain more in a moment, along with more about hotfixes and updaters as concepts (and where to find them specifically, for each CF release).

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Note: This blog post is from 2010. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

I hear people raise concerns with memory problems quite often, whether in my CF Server Troubleshooting practice, or just in my participating in many mailing lists. Indeed, addressing this issue more than a few times the past couple of weeks has motivated me to create this, which will be a series of blog entries.

The series parts are expected to be:

• Step 1: Determine if indeed you are getting "outofmemory" errors (this entry)
• Step 2: Realize that having high memory usage is not necessarily a problem (entry to come)
• Step 3: Realize that OutOfMemory does not necessarily mean "out of heap" (entry to come)
• Step 4: Diagnose why you really are running out of heap (if you are) (entry to come)
• Step 5: Realize that CF is maybe suffering because you set the heap too large (entry to come)
• Step 6: If CF is hanging up but NOT due to memory, what could it be? (entry to come)

Let's get started and see how far we get...

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Note: This blog post is from 2010. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

It's a simple JVM tweak to cause it to use a fixed port:

-DDEBUGGER_SERVER_PORT=portNumber

You can add this either in the "Java & JVM" page of the CF Admin (if in Standard or Enterprise Server), or on the java.args line in the jvm.config file (for any form of CF).

You do need to restart CF for this to take effect.

A few warnings are in order

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Note: This blog post is from 2010. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

The quick answer is to use either of two approaches: either the jrunsvc.exe in CF's runtime\bin (or [jrun]\bin), or do a manual registry tweak, both of which I show below.

Update for CF10, forward: CF10 and above change to using a new set of xml entries in the neo-logging.xml file, called maxOutLogSize and maxOutFileBackup that should control this (and which should not to be confused with the long-existing maxFileSize and maxFileBackup, both of which correspond to the settings on the CF Admin logging Settings page.) That said, some users had found in the early updates of CF2016 that somehow the xml entries were NOT being honored. It's not clear from them if later updates did fix that problem. I've not heard it as a widely-reported one.

BTW, if you don't know what CF's -out*.log files are about (they're important!), they're technically holding the console output for CF, when it's started as a Windows service. This can be vital information that is NOT logged in the normal [cf]\logs directory or Admin Log Files display. (If you start CF from the command line, then the same info is written to the command line instead and not to the log file.)

(If you're on *nix, pretty much the same info appears instead in the [cf]/logs/cfserver.log. I know some people have wondered about controlling the size of that file. What I discuss here applies only to Windows.)

Background on the sizing of the -out*.log files

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Note: This blog post is from 2010. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

If you just want to look at a file, there's a great free tool to do it: UniversalViewer.

It can open a 1GB file as fast as a 1kb file (because it only pulls in what it needs to show the screen full of text you're looking at.) And there are times when you may well need to look at some very large files, especially when troubleshooting CF servers, like I do.

And actually, as its name implies, UniversalViwer can view far more than just text files, including images and more.

I've just only ever used it for looking at log files, for which it excels (and yes, you can search within the file, set it to tail files, and more.)

I've been touting the tool for years in classes and presentations, and I was about to mention it in another blog entry, but then I realized I'd not blogged about it on its own. Rather than have the reference lost in another blog entry, here's its moment to shine!

And yes, I do realize there are several other tools that can do this. I list this one and several others in a category of my CF411 list: Generic File View/Log Analysis Tools. (Note that there are some nifty tools in that category there for looking specifically at CSV files, as well as other entire categories for specific kinds of logs, like CF logs, web server logs, windows event logs, etc.)