Note: This blog post is from 2015. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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.

Even better, for a limited time (as of this writing in Mar 2015), folks making such a purchase of CF there will get 20% off a purchase of FusionReactor Standard or Enterprise Subscription, if purchased at the same time. Such offers come and go, if you may be reading this later.

So if you're looking to buy CF, you can save money on CF AND get a great monitoring solution for CF. I work with it daily, using it on my sites and nearly always recommending it as the best tool for solving CF problems. (It also works with Lucee/Railo, and BlueDragon Server JX, as well as Tomcat, JBoss, Jetty, GlassFish, and indeed any Java application.)

See my FusionReactor category of blog posts for more I've shared on FR over the years.

Note: This blog post is from 2015. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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.

But more than that basic info, I'd like in this post to take advantage of the chance to share a few things related to the topic of upgrading FusionReactor, including some common questions I often am asked as I assist people in using it:

• Where do I get the update?
• How do I find out what's new in the update?
• Should I hesitate about applying the very latest FR update as soon as it comes out?
• How would you I know there WAS an update to FR available?
• Do I just need to run the full installer or can I update just one file perhaps?
• Do I need to restart CF (or Railo/Lucee/Tomcat, etc.) for the update to take effect?
• Can I update FRAM and choose NOT to update my monitored CF/Railo/Lucee/Tomcat/etc instance?
• Why do you keep referring to "CF/Railo/Lucee/Tomcat/etc"? I thought FR was a CF monitor tool?
• What if I'm on an FR version older than 5.0?

For these and more, read on.

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Note: This blog post is from 2015. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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 solution is relatively easy, and the problem could maybe be fixed (or at least warned about) by Adobe (and I just filed a bug report for it). Until that happens, I wanted to share this. For more, read on.

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Note: This blog post is from 2015. 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.

• ColdFusion 11 Update 5 prerelease build now available
• ColdFusion 10 Update 16 prerelease build available

This is on top of the release earlier this week of the final version of CF11 Update 4 (which had been in prerelease for a couple of weeks):

• ColdFusion 11 Update 4 released

Great to see the CF team cranking on the bug fixes. I count just under 120 in the technotes for CF11 update 5, and just under 40 in CF10 update 16. And there were just under 200 fixes in Update 3 of CF11, which again was released just in recent weeks.

Yeah, but what about all those bugs?

Yes, I know some could twist things and say "yeah, but the problem is that there are so many bugs to be fixed". Sure.

Still, for others who may have longed to see their bugs fixed,

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Note: This blog post is from 2015. 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.

Wouldn't it be nice to know, at any moment (such as when things are going badly), just what queries (or stored procedures or commands) were running in the database at that point in time?

Well here's good news: if you're running SQL Server, the following SQL query will show you just that: the currently running SQL statement(s) and some additional details about each query including their duration, their database name, the program executing the SQL, the session id, and much more.

For more (including why things like Activity Monitor's "recent expensive queries", sp_who2, and others aren't the answer, as well as what to do if you may be unable to run this code), please read on. (I also mention the classic sp_whoisactive as another solution, and have updated this post since its 2015 writing to mention the newer "active expensive queries" in Activity Monitor, which you may find in later versions of SQL Server, both of which you can consider in addition to the below.)

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Note: This blog post is from 2015. 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 book is a quick read, and really well done, including a discussion of what statistics are, why they're important, how to diagnose trouble with them, and how to use the SSMS interface and/or SQL statements/commands to better understand them.

There are plenty of screenshots and it's written in a tutorial manner. And while it's from 2010 and covers only up to SQL Server 2008, most of the concepts apply just as well to SS 2012 and beyond, and of course many organizations are still running on SS 2008 or even earlier!

Most important, Schmeling explains why it's important that you take responsibility to both create and maintain statistics (rather than leave it as something that "the database" should handle. And if you are leaving it as something "the db should handle", you can use this to make sure that person is doing their job with respect to statistics.)

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Note: This blog post is from 2015. 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.

That said, there are some concerns I have, with respect to how I fear some may read and take action based on it (especially the notion of deleting the cfclasses files, as a possible solution to the problem).

I'm not contradicting Rahul here, just elaborating on some points, as someone who (like some on the CF team) helps people with CF server troubleshooting every day.

I started to write these thoughts as a comment there, and (as often happens) it grew long so I thought it better to be a blog entry rather than a long comment, and point people here. Once I did that I decided to go further still, hoping to really help those interested to consider the issue more carefully. (It also gives me a chance to highlight again the Adobe CF team blog, something I recommend EVERYONE reading this should follow!)

One quick point (and update) for the TL;DR crowd: My recommendation is that you move the cfclasses folder out of that location, as a temporary test, to see if it makes CF startup happen faster. If it does, I explain why and what the implications are in the choices of renaming, deleting, moving, or disabling the related "save class files" feature. Also, I add an update in E.1 below (since posting this) which you may really want to read: consider turning off your anti-virus software's real-time protection against the cfclasses folder to see if that alone helps with startup.

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Note: This blog post is from 2014. 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.

Has this happened to you? You wanted to update the JVM which CF uses to use a new version...

• so you found some resource on the web showing how to update, and it seemed simple enough
• and then you tried restarting CF and wham, it won't start, or the admin won't open, or code starts failing
• and maybe it's that things didn't fail immediately, but within hours or days folks report things breaking since you made the change
• and now you're stuck wondering, "what happened? and how am I supposed to fix this?"

It's a tough position to be in, and tragic of course if CF won't start. But no, you do NOT need to reinstall CF!

Often it's just one thing you did by mistake, though there are indeed several possible reasons why your attempt to update CF's JVM can fail or lead to unexpected problems. And as you google about, you may find all kinds of helpful but often misinformed or spartan suggestions that may or may not help much.

So I offer here over a dozen of things you can and should consider/look at, some of which you may quickly recover from or be able to undo (depends on what you did). And all this applies to Lucee, Railo, and BlueDragon as well, though folder locations will differ.

If you're facing this bind right now, you can skip over the following to the the section, "Seeing better error info, when the CF service won't start", and then the section after that "So what went wrong?", where I present each likely problem and solution.

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Note: This blog post is from 2014. 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.

After complaining about how poorly he felt CF had responded to his seeking help, he threw in additionally that "the existing private consultants prices are a total joke - they are taking us for a ride!".

Well, I just couldn't let go his comment go unremarked.

I started to write my reply there, but it grew long (as is my wont). So rather than post there (where most comments are brief), I decided to post it here instead and point to it there. Perhaps some of my readers here may appreciate it as well, as I also talk about some thoughts on CF troubleshooting in general.

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Note: This blog post is from 2014. 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.

Before I discuss that, you may know of a couple of other solutions for this challenge: the CF admin ColdFusion Archive/CAR mechanism, available in some but not all editions (more below), and this same "import wizard" which runs at the end of CF installation, importing settings from an older CF version if found on the same box.

But what if either of those solutions don't work for you, and you have dozens of dsn's, scheduled tasks, mappings, or other settings you want to get from one machine/version to another?

You are NOT stuck having to manually copy settings from one screen to another! (And you should be very careful about the common hack solution of copying neo*.xml files from one instance to another, which may not always work and may break things.)

In this entry I'll discuss how you CAN indeed import the CF admin settings from nearly ANY release of CF into nearly ANY OTHER release of CF, in a fully supported way, and which CAN be done even after installation of a new CF release. (I say "nearly", because I worked with someone wanting to do this import of CF7 settings into CF10, and that large a jump was was not supported.)

I'll also mention an important potential gotcha to beware, as well as how to to get around that.

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