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 Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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 Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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

One of the most important features is the stack tracing feature, used to understand what's holding up a long-running request.

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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.

But as is often the case in a lot of the CF server troubleshooting consulting I do, I find the causes to be far less often what most people seem to suspect. So what would I look for when someone reported high CPU in ColdFusion (or Lucee or Railo )? Read on.

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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.

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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.

And your operation fails. You're then prompted to "Click here to login", but even if you back up or client another link, you'll be prompted with the CF Admin login.

What gives? Why is it happening? And how can you fix things? Is CF broken? No, not in the sense that you need to reinstall or anything. The good news is that there is a quite simple solution. Well, there are several, depending on your goals.

The simple solution: delete the duplicate cfid/cftoken or jsessionid cookies that you will find your browser is sending to CF. But there is much more to this, as well as other solutions, which would be worth most readers taking a few minutes to read on here.

BTW, the same root problem can be the cause of your own application's users finding that they can't stay logged in. More on that in a moment.

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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.

Of course, in CF10 it's easier now because of the built-in "server updates" feature of the CF Admin. But in earlier releases, it was all on you to both keep up on the updates and to apply them manually. And a lot of people either never bothered, or may have tried and failed, or did it but got it wrong.

What you need to know

So in this blog entry, I some key info that will help you, if you may be in need of applying one or more of those updates to CF9 and earlier. Indeed, I'll point to some past entries I've done where I shared a lot more detail that I find is vital and rarely mentioned when some people try to share just the bare minimum of info (often leaving people hanging).

For instance, I'll help you answer such questions as what hotfixes do you already have applied? How do you find out? And you need to know exactly what version of CF you have, whether 9.0/9.0.1/9.0.2, 8.0/8.0.1, 7.0/7.0.1/7.0.2, and so on. I'll explain how to tell and why that's important, and especially when it comes to finding and applying hotfixes. And if you have applied hotfixes, are you sure you have done it right? It's easy to get things wrong and botch things. I'll help you avoid several very common mistakes.

(That's why it's so great that CF10 finally handles things for us. But this entry, focused on 9 and earlier, is not the place to discuss concerns with the CF10 hotfix mechanism. If you have questions or concerns about that, see the substantial CF10 Hotfix Installation Guide from Adobe, a 50-question FAQ on all things related to that feature.)

I'll also point you to where to find hotfixes and installers for CF9 and earlier (not as easy as it may seem), and still more.

If any of that's of interest, and I hope it is if you're on CF9 or earlier, then read on.

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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.

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Note: This blog post is from 2013. 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.

In brief, a VERY common problem is that while they MAY WELL have applied the provided "updates" for CF, folks often do NOT notice that they may have to (and generally must) "update" the web server "connector" (if they are using an external web server, like IIS or Apache) as a separate manual step, after applying the update.

I explain here what that means, how do to it, and why you may miss that you need to.

Update in 2019:

Since writing this entry, I did one in 2019 on When and how to upgrade CF web server connector, easier since CF2016, which at least makes it EASIER to upgrade, though much of what I write here still applies. I also updated this post since originally writing it, in ways discussed below.

(Or if you'd rather just have me help you quickly help you analyze and rectify your situation, whether with regard to the connectors or any other CF server troubleshooting, I can do that in a brief consulting session, likely less than an hour, remotely and securely. I provide all the detail here for those who prefer to "go it on their own". For more on my consulting services, including rates, approach, satisfaction guarantee, and more, see the consulting page at carehart.org.)

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Note: This blog post is from 2013. 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.

Anyway, here is the answer I wanted to offer to that question...

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