ColdFusion Server Monitor

So last week we had a site running amok on one of our CF8 servers so we decided to use the ColdFusion Server Monitor to see if we could figure it out. Well starting the thing pegged the server’s processors to 100% and we couldn’t get anything done, so we rebooted the machine. After reboot – since it was the middle of the day and all – we noticed that several sites were not coming back up. So we started looking around on the Internet for ways we could fix it. The sites that weren’t coming back up were all Model-Glue run so we thought it might be something in that. Producing the CFLoop error when the application was trying to compile for the first time.

Well after some digging, I came across several posts by people mentioning how Sean Corfield had talked about the JRE version included with CF8 was experiencing a bug in the way it compiled components – something that any Model-Glue application is going to do extensively at startup as it tries to build the entire library for ColdSpring. You can read about it here - ColdFusion 8 And Java 6.  So we changed out the JRE version overnight to the newest release of Java 6 Update 12.  We were still having problems with the sites compiling though, so we switched to 11.  Still no joy.

So we were getting a little concerned – it was going on a full day now since we had the sites go down.  So we said – well let’s try that Server Monitor again and see if we can tell what’s happening with it.  So we fired it up expecting the worst and saw that all of it’s options were still running.  Basically, restarting the server hadn’t set the Server Monitor back to an Off position.  Once we turned all the options off and saved it, the two down sites started again.   Unbelievable!

So the side note is, having found the article by Corfield, we have a more responsive version of ColdFusion 8 with Java 6 running on our server.  I think I can notice a difference, not sure if the clients can or not, but I know it made for a happy day once everything came back on line.