Note: This blog post is from 2009. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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.

What was so curious was that my local mail client (Outlook) was configured with the exact same servername, username, password, and port, and ran fine from the same laptop on which CF was running. Both were trying to send email via the remote mail server. Why would CFMAIL fail when Outlook would work, both connecting from the same machine to the same SMTP server with the same connection parms?

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Note: This blog post is from 2009. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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.

Before you dismiss the idea outright, consider the description below, and if you have an hour to spare, come check it out. You may learn something very surprising. Some of the things I'll discuss are not often talked about, from my observation. Yet I help a lot of people who are hurt by them.

I'll add, also, that out of nearly 80 sessions I've hosted, I've only spoken a few times. The meetup is definitely not "the Charlie show". Thanks to all the many other speakers who have come out the past couple of years.

My Session Title: Sessions and Clients and Crashes, Oh My!

Description: You may be suffering and not even realize it. As a consultant, I focus on helping people troubleshoot CF problems, and one of the most common (and least appreciated) problems people suffer are those related to having too many active sessions in memory or a high rate of creation/update of client variables (whether in registry or database). EVEN IF YOU'D SAY YOU DON'T USE SESSIONS OR CLIENT VARIABLES, this may impact you.

In this session, veteran CFer Charlie Arehart will explain the problem. Using live demonstrations and offering code you can use yourself for free, he'll show how to identify both the extent of and the cause of the problems, and various solutions. The concepts provided will apply to any version of CF (or BD or Railo).

To RSVP (not required) or to learn more about the meeting, including the URL to attend, see the event page.

Update:The recording for this is available here.

Note: This blog post is from 2009. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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.

First, the speaker lineup starts with the ColdFusion Jedi himself, Ray Camden. Beyond that, several past Atlanta CFUG (and CFUnited) speakers will be presenting (on topics not presented at the ACFUG before): Doug Knudsen, John Mason, Andy Powell, and myself (Charlie Arehart). You can see their topic titles and descriptions here: http://express.cfunited.com/go/atlanta/2009/schedule

Second, there will also be giveaways including a free copy of Flex, ColdFusion, a free ticket to CFUnited, and more.

All this for just $149 (use code CFXEB2 to get this early bird price, even at the door). Pre-registration if preferred, of course, to help them plan for the included coffee/donuts, lunch/sodas, and snacks/beverages, but you can get in at the door at that price with that code. Register or get more info at http://express.cfunited.com/go/atlanta/2009.

Third, note that 100% of your Express event payment can be applied towards your attendance at CFUnited 2009. Between the content, the giveaways (at great odds in the smaller venue than the full conference), and the credit toward the full conference, it's really a great deal.

For still other reasons to attend, see the "top 10 reasons" at http://express.cfunited.com/. If you have any last minute questions not answered on the resources above, you can also call the organizer, Liz Frederick, at 410-963-9418.

Finally, for more about the venue, Roundbox Global (across the street from the Kind Plow Arts Center), including parking information, see this blog entry.

Hope to see you there.

PS If you know anyone in the New York City area, there will be an event there also, next week, April 20. More here.

Note: This blog post is from 2009. 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.

Basic CF Monitoring in Nagios

First let me share that if you've not explored monitoring CF with Nagios at all, here's at least one blog entry from 2005 discussing that. (A more recent one, at http://profec.net/2009/01/12/monitoring-coldfusion-with-nagios/, which I used to list here, is no longer responding, nor could I find it on archive.org.)

Of course, you can easily use Nagios primarily to report whether CF's up or down, but you can also monitor basic statistics such as are provided via CFSTAT (also available on Windows via Perfmon, which also exposes generic stats about all processes), as demonstrated in that blog entry.

But you may have noticed that, if you run the Multiserver (multiple instances) version of CF, those CFSTAT and Windows Perfmon Stats aren't available on that version of CF.

So what to do if you wanted to monitor more about what's going on inside of CF?

FusionReactor Nagios Plug-in

If you're running FusionReactor Enterprise, you can now get that additional information via the free FusionReactor Nagios Plugin. It's a perl app that when implemented will expose certain key statistics in a way that Nagio can process them (and some are things that CFSTAT and the CF Permon stats don't report):

• Count of current running requests, and total count of all requests run
• Count of request queued by FusionReactor
• Average request runtime (since server start), and Recent request runtime (in past 60s, by default)
• Count of recent slow pages
• Memory free in bytes and percentage
• Memory Total and Max
• Instance and System CPU Use percentage
• Count of recently completed JDBC requests

Note that this is technically community-contributed feature (from an Intergral employee, David Stockton), not a supported feature.

If you're running or are interested in FusionReactor Enterprise, check it out.