CF911: Lies, damned lies, and when memory problems not be at all what they seem, Part 1
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 Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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.Following on my earlier entry, CF911: Lies, Damned Lies, and CF Request Timeouts...What You May Not Realize, another common source of confusion and misunderstanding for people is when they think their server is "running out of memory", when in fact the problem is often not at all what they think. In this entry, I want to apply the same "cranky" tone :-) and extended explanation to this equally controversial/confusing topic.
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...