Note: This blog post is from 2016. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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'm delighted to announce that I'll be presenting again this year at CFCamp, in Munich, Oct 20-21.
Note: This blog post is from 2016. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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.This is a follow-up to a post I did in late 2014, CF911: 'Help! I've updated the JVM which ColdFusion uses, and now it won't start!'. In that post, I listed about a dozen common problems that befall people who try to update the JVM that CF is using (and it and this post apply as well to Lucee or BlueDragon, or indeed any Java application server).
In this post, I want to elaborate on one more common mistake. Well, mistake may be too strong word. It's about a default option when you run a Java JDK installer (see the other post for more on JDK vs JRE options).
In short, I make the case here for why you should NOT let the JDK installer implement its "public jre" option.
Note: This blog post is from 2016. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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 want to apply some update to your current version of CF--and it fails. Ugh. While the ColdFusion admin has a simple update UI mechanism, what can you do if the update fails to apply? Indeed, how can you know if it DID fail? how can you recover? what might you do to prevent a failure? The answers may be simple on the surface, but not obvious to most.
And you'll likely be in panic mode. Many find after applying a ColdFusion update that either CF won't start at all, or they can't access the ColdFusion Admin, or some part of CF or their app doesn't work. Or perhaps the problem may not become clear for hours or even days.
Typically the issue is that there was an error during the update process which CF attempts, and that might be rather easily confirmed and resolved. In this post, I share several tips and observations related to all this, based on my years of providing remote CF troubleshooting support.
Note: This blog post is from 2016. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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'd like to take a diversion from my recent posts focused on CF2016 and talk about something that applies (and should interest) anyone using CF 10, 11, or 2016.
Have you heard of the new "metrics log" option that was enabled in CF10? If you have not, it's worth knowing about (there's precious little documentation, and I'll point to it, and give you still more info to help you use it). It's a useful, low-impact mechanism to get some high-level metrics logged by CF every 60 seconds (by default), and stored along with other CF logs.
If you did know about it, you've probably had some problems with it. Why does it show "nulls"? What do reported metrics really mean? Why do they not jive with what I'd expect to be the numbers reported?
In this post, and a Part 2 to come, I will introduce the metrics log, pointing out some key things you need to know to have it setup to work at all, and then I'll share my observations of things I've come to understand about the reported metrics.
Note: This blog post is from 2016. 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.As folks continue to explore ColdFusion (2016 Release), aka CF2016, regarding what's new or changed, I thought I'd put together a listing of what has changed in the CF Admin specifically. This is another in a series of posts I started last week on CF2016.
Note: This blog post is from 2016. 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.Often in my role as an independent consultant providing ColdFusion server troubleshooting services, I find myself helping folks determine whether or that a problem is in their database.
And though it may surprise many, I generally do not find the problem to be very often with the SQL they are running. More often it's about configuration issues. For instance, it may be that they have not been keeping their indexes or statistics updated, or it may be that they need indexes that they don't have, or have too many that they don't really need. Or it may be that they have not done any tuning at all and the default settings for their database server are not be well suited to them.
And though such problems are common to any database server (MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and so on), I find that an awful lot of my clients (for whatever reason) do run on Windows and do use SQL Server (and that doesn't make them stupid or lazy. Different strokes for different folks).
So in this post I want to focus on some SQL Server resources, related to such matters, which I find that I refer folks to often. Some are blog posts, some are code you can run, and some are tools (mostly free).
People using other DBs would do well to read along and could find corresponding resources/tools for the same problems in their respective DB servers.
Note: This blog post is from 2016. 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.This isn't "new" information, though it was new to me this week. I came across this excellent set of youtube videos, 50 substantial yet brief overviews of key IIS topics from IIS/.NET/Windows guru Scott Forsyth.
I offer the list of topic titles (and links to them) below, and have even created a YouTube playlist with them, but note that the links below go to pages that the author had created where he offered a helpful introduction to each video (more than appears in the Youtube description for each).
I had also wanted to offer here this brief overview of them, to set the context and encourage you to view them, so as not to dismiss them if other tech video series haven't impressed you. Whether you're new to IIS 7 or 8, or an old hat user, there really is something for everyone, including wonderful little tips he shares in passing during most videos (which average about 10-20 minutes each).
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.If you're running CF 10 or above, there was a very interesting post on the Adobe CF blog, from July 19 2015, entitled, Configuring Status Worker in Connectors. The Adobe blog post title may not have caught your attention, but it's about setting up a lightweight and built-in Tomcat monitoring feature for observing the status of the Tomcat web server connector.
You may want to consider enabling it, but I would add some caveats and observations that I share below. Note that it's really quite easy to enable, and DOES NOT require a restart of CF (only of your web server, or technically in IIS, a recycling of the application pool/s--a web site restart is not enough) to take effect.
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.Just wanted to share word (sorry it took so long) that I'd been selected as a speaker at the upcoming dev.Objective() conference, in Minneapolis in Mid-May. Hope to see lots of my fellow CFers there, and of course new folks who were not CFers.
While the conference name has changed (from cf.Objective()), there are still plenty of CF-oriented topics, and of course as nearly everyone would point out, it's good for everyone to expand their reach and focus.
To that end, I'll be doing a topic a bit different than my normal focus of CF server troubleshooting. Instead, recognizing that there will be folks there who either use other servers, or develop web apps or mobile apps, I'll do a bit of a "soft" topic on how to troubleshoot performance problems more generically, in:
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.This one causes a lot of heartburn for folks: you add a new instance in CF10 or 11 (in editions other than Standard, which do support adding instances), and you find that you can't seem to have the web server configuration tool (wsconfig) connect sites to that new instance(s). You never see the new instance listed in the UI of the wsconfig tool. What gives?
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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