CF911: Is your ColdFusion service taking too long to shut down? Find out why
Note: This blog post is from 2011. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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 ever found (or heard others complain) that sometimes ColdFusion doesn't stop (or it takes a long time to do so)? It can be especially challenging when you're running CF on Windows as a Service, for reasons I'll explain here and in a follow-up entry.
First, this one will help you perhaps find why it's so slow. You may just have been looking in the wrong place for that diagnostic information. Second, the next entry will offer tips to handle on better handling the situation (that the Windows service is slow to stop, and timeouts in the Windows Services panel itself) which you may need to consider until you do solve the root cause problem (or in case it happens again for other reasons).
(Note that most of this info will apply as well if your problem is that CF's taking a long time to start, also.)
As some of you know, I do CF server troubleshooting as an independent consultant. In helping several people a week, this is a fairly common complaint. This also came up on a mailing list today, so I decided to offer these thoughts here.
I am a regular follower of your blogs, specially the ones on Performance Tuning and System Administration. This particular topic is of some importance to me because we are ending up in this situation quite often and need to reboot our server to actually get ColdFusion services started again.
One observation is that, we get into this situation where we are not able to successfully stop ColdFusion Services and then restart it only when the server has become unresponsive for some reason (another issue that we are trying to find a root cause).
When the server is stable, we do not see issues with stopping and starting ColdFusion services, its only when the server is unresponsive.
Let me know if you have any insights to such a situation and have some quick solutions to look at.
As for your problems (both why you find you sometimes have to restart the server to restart CF, and why sometimes CF hangs up in the first place), I'm sure the problem can be solved. As you indicate that you've read my blog for sometime, you know then that I do this sort of CF server troubleshooting every day for folks as an independent consultant.
But I'm afraid I can't really help solve your particular problem here in the comments, based solely on the information you have provided. And honestly, I doubt your problem could be solved in an extended interchange of comments (or forum posts, or emails, whether to me or even to Adobe). There can just be so many variables: so many places to look and things to consider.
Instead, this is a situation where you really need someone to be on-hand with you looking your server. And by on-hand, I don't mean "on-site" but via the sort of remote troubleshooting I do offer, all day every day to thousands of clients. You can find more about my services, rates, approach, satisfaction guarantee, and more at http://www.carehart....
You'll see there that the approach I take is not that you give me remote desktop access (which would require you to give me a login, and likely to open ports, etc.). Instead, I propose we use a desktop sharing solution (I use join.me, or we could use gotomeeting, webex, etc if you preferred). That way, I just see your screen while YOU remote into your server and YOU login. I'm just "looking over your shoulder" and would guide the process of finding and resolving your problem.
And I'm confident we could solve it, as I've helped many in your situation. So if you're interested, please check out that page and get back to me using the contact mechanisms there and we can proceed, even today if you may be able to arrange it.