[Looking for Charlie's main web site?]

Finding resources on ColdFusion's mobile development features

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 Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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.
Have you wondered where you can find more about ColdFusion's mobile development features? (Did you know that CF11 had added such features?) There are several resources provided by Adobe and others. In this post I highlight those various resources, with a focus on the many (and many kinds of) Adobe-provided ones.

[....Continue Reading....]

Monitoring ColdFusion web server connectors, more on Tomcat 'Status Workers'

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 Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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.

[....Continue Reading....]

See you at dev.Objective() in mid-May (I'll be speaking)

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 Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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:

Hey, my web app's slow. Where's the problem?

[....Continue Reading....]

Looking to buy ColdFusion? Get it at a discount from the FR folks, and an additional discount off FR

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 in the market to buy ColdFusion, whether a full license or an upgrade from the prior release, you can get a discount off the retail (Adobe) price by buying from www.buy-adobe-software.com, which is a site by the fine folks who make FusionReactor, who are an official Adobe reseller. Why pay full price for CF if you can save, up to 10% currently?

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.

FusionReactor updated today: some general info related to getting/applying FR updates

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.
How to update FusionReactorFusionReactor users will want to know that there was a new update released today, 5.2.6. The update is free for those on 5.2.x releases as well as those with maintenance agreements. And you can just download the installer and run it to update your current version (even back to FR 5.0, if you've not updated FR 5 since you first installed it).

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.

[....Continue Reading....]

CF911: Help, How do I connect sites to a new instance w/ the ColdFusion 10/11 webserver config tool?

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.

[....Continue Reading....]

Updates, updates. Get your CF updates! The CF Team has been busy fixin' bugs!

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'd not noticed, the CF team has been busy fixin' bugs! Over 300 in CF11 in just the past month. Check out these two announcements today of prereleases of update 5 for CF11 and update 16 for CF10:

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):

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,

[....Continue Reading....]

Free, simple code to find out what SQL statements are running slow in SQL Server right now

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.
Often when people are trying to troubleshoot seeming problems in ColdFusion (or whatever app server you may use), they may wonder if (or have tools which suggest that) their CF requests are being held up waiting for a query to run in the database, which seems hung up.

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.)

[....Continue Reading....]

Understanding SQL Server Statistics: A great, free, relatively brief ebook

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 want to understand the important concept of SQL Server statistics (a mechanism within SQL Server which tracks metadata about your data, and which can significantly affect query performance if not managed well), I think you can do no better than than to spend an hour or so reading the free 40-page e-book, SQL Server Statistics, written by Holger Schmeling and offered by Red-gate. book cover

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.)

[....Continue Reading....]

Solving slow CF startup: my elaborating on an Adobe blog entry on a possible solution

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 fine folks at the Adobe CF blog posted a blog entry today, on "Sometimes ColdFusion services refuse to start normally post server restart" (by Rahul Upadhyay), which offers some helpful information on one possible solution to the stated problem of slow CF startup.

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.

[....Continue Reading....]

Copyright ©2024 Charlie Arehart
Carehart Logo
BlogCFC was created by Raymond Camden. This blog is running version 5.005.
(Want to validate the html in this page?)

Managed Hosting Services provided by
Managed Dedicated Hosting