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How to identify what jvm.config a ColdFusion instance uses (and vice-versa)

Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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 run ColdFusion in its Multiserver mode (multiple instances), you may know that you can configure things so that different instances use different jvm.config files, otherwise by default, all instances share just one. (If you didn't know how to change that, particularly if running CF as Windows Services, I'll offer some references explaining more.)

But have you ever wondered which jvm.config is used by a given instance? Or perhaps found multiple jvm.configs in your [jrun4]\bin directory and wondered which instance each went with? The answer isn't as straightforward as it may seem, when you're running CF as Windows Services. There's no single CF feature that reports this, but I do offer a solution here.

The simple answer is that one can find the information in the registry. The longer answer, including how to find that, as well as how to get that info more easily from the command line if you may prefer, follows.

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How to tell what, if any, hotfixes have been applied to ColdFusion (9 and earlier)

Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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.
I often see people struggling with confusion over what hotfixes have been applied to CF. They may wonder "which have we applied?", or worse, they may not have applied any and just don't know "how to know" whether they have. I have good news, but it may not be the answer most would suspect.

The common answer offered is that one should use the "system info" page in the CF Admin, and its available "update level" field.

But I will assert that's not the "right answer" after all, or certainly not the "best answer" to really know what hotfixes (plural) have been applied. Know why? If not, I'll explain here, and I'll show what I would say is the "right" answer to "what hotfixes have you applied?"

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Have you noticed the ColdFusion 10 admin allows only one login at a time? It's by design

Note: This blog post is from 2012. 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.
Someone raised a question on one of the Adobe forums saying that they kept getting kicked out of (logged off) the CF Admin in CF10.

Ultimately, he realized it was that when one of his colleagues logged into CF 10 Admin, he got logged out, and vice-versa. Certainly frustrating.

And yes, it's by design in CF10, as part of various security enhancements. The issue is that only one person can be logged in to a given account name in the CF Admin (by default, it's "admin"). There is a solution: create new logins for each person needing to access the Admin. I discuss this and much more below.

Update 1: Since I wrote this entry back in June '12, I did a video for Adobe about a year later where I walk through this in several minutes. You may want to check that out.

Update 2: Great news for those using CF11: CF11 addresses this problem with a new feature in the CF Admin. You may want to read ahead to understand the problem to appreciate the point of this solution. Anyway, see the Security > Administrator page and its option, "Allow Concurrent Login Sessions for Administrator Console". The docs say that it will be disabled by default, allowing multipel logings, unless you choose the "securee profile" option during installation or via the admin (the ability to change that in the Admin is another new feature of CF11), in which case concurrent access by a given account it will be disabled.

Where's is this change in CF10 documented?

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Recordings from ColdFusion Dev Week (cfdevweek) 2012 Now Posted

Note: This blog post is from 2012. 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 finding this page as a result of searching for recordings from later years, I have a new post on the 2017 recordings.]

If you missed any of the sessions from last week's ColdFusion Dev Week, or want to watch them again, you can now see the recordings for all of them. Just click the link for your desired session on this page.

Note that you do still need to use an Adobe account login to view them.

For my two talks, the direct links (still requiring your Adobe account login) are:

Three little niggles

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Getting ColdFusion 8/9 downloads (with Verity): ways that may work even after today

Note: This blog post is from 2012. 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.

By now most in the CF world (who are connected to community news, at least) should have heard that today is the last day Adobe will be offering a release of CF 9 including Verity, and CF8 at all. I offer here a little more news on that, but more important I offer how you can still find and get those downloads if you want them, even when no longer listed as links on the site. They're now no longer easy to find.

(And I have updated the entry as of Aug 3, 2012, and all below still applies, unless stricken out.)

First, as for what's changing, it's that Adobe has to "pull from the shelves" any releases of CF that include Verity. But while many have been asserting that CF9 was going away, that's not true. And even CF8 can be obtained formally under certain conditions.

But I also offer here some ways you may be able to get these files even if Adobe no longer offers links to them.

But let's tackle a few points of common misinformation this week.

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I'll be presenting two talks online at ColdFusion Developer Week (CFDevWeek), June 4-8th

Note: This blog post is from 2012. 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.
Join me and over a dozen other presenters as we present (for free, online) 19 sessions over 5 days for the upcoming Adobe ColdFusion Developer Week 2012. Some of the sessions are on CF10, but others are not.

As for my talks, I'll be presenting my two cf.Objective() talks. Here are links for the description and my bio for each, but note that SIGNUP is done on the main page above:

These talks went very well both at cf.objective() and at the week-long CF10/Scotch on the Road tour where I presented them last week in 5 cities in Europe, so the talks are also well-practiced!

That said, I may tweak their look/feel or add new content before next week (indeed, I have tweaked the content considerably since the conference and did so also as the week progressed last week, adding new discoveries at each new city as I had so much time to explore during the trip.)

Please note the following points which I'm sure some would want to ask:

  • The times offered (above and on the site) are US PACIFIC time. Adjust your calendar entries accordingly!
  • You DO have to register (for free) at that first URL, to get the info for joining in on each Connect meeting
  • Yes, the meetings will be recorded (although many enjoy participating in the live talks so that they can get questions answered during or after the session). I'll offer a link here (and/or as a new entry) when the recordings are posted.

Finally, If you want to an easy URL to offer for that is http://adobe.com/go/cfdeveloperweek, and note that the hashtag for it is #CFDevWeek.

Slides available for my two recent talks: Hidden gems in CF10 & About ColdFusion 10 on Tomcat

Note: This blog post is from 2012. 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 interested in checking out the slides for my two most recent talks, they are now available online:

These were offered recently at cf.objective() and the SOTR/CF10 European Tour events, as I had announced a couple of weeks ago.

These are just PDFs of the slides for now, no recordings. But as those who have seen me talk before know, I tend to offer a lot of detail in my slides, so that they do stand well alone (against the modern fashion of slides that are mostly just pictures).

Sure, I could do more pictures and offer slide notes. It's not that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, just that it takes a lot more patience! :-) I may modify these presentations that way, in fact, for future presentations of them. In fact, I will be blogging shortly about the next planned presentation of them for the Adobe CF 10 Developer Week coming up in June.

BTW, apologies to any folks from the two events who had looked for the PDF for the Tomcat talk previously. Somehow I had failed to offer a link to the PDF on the presentations page, even though I was updating and uploading new variations of it both before and after the events. Darn.

Could CF image processing be killing your ColdFusion server? Explanation and solutions.

Note: This blog post is from 2012. 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.
Are you having slow ColdFusion pages and wondering what may be the cause? There can of course be many root causes, but a common one that I'm finding lately as I help people is due to using certain of CF's image processing features, especially resizing such as to create thumbnails after a file is uploaded (or when many files are uploaded).

Such folks may be using the CFIMAGE action="resize" tag, or the imageResize() or ImageScaleToFit() functions to do resizing. (Or they may be also processing images using ImageRotate, ImageShear, or ImageTranslate, though the defaults for those are not problematic like the resize/scale tag/function processing).

The "problem" (if this is the cause of a slow page) is due to a default "interpolation" setting for CFIMAGE resizing, imageResize, and ImageScaletoFit. The default may not perform well at all. The good news is that the value is configurable, and you can test to compare quality/performance of difference values, as will explained below. There are still some other things to consider also. (If you're currently using CFIMAGE to do resizing, jump to the last section of this entry to see an example of code switching from the "slow" approach to the faster one. But really, you ought to read the rest of this entry to understand what's being proposed.)

While I offer all the info here for your consideration, if you need help implementing the solution, or better understanding how to find and resolve these or other problems affecting your CF server performance, see more on my CF server troubleshooting consulting services.

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Speaking May 21-25 in 5-day European ColdFusion Road Tour, Scotch on the Road

Note: This blog post is from 2012. 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.
Cool news! I'll see some old friends and make new ones next week in Europe, where I will be repeating my two talks from cf.objective() as part of a 5-day European Road Tour, the 2012 Scotch on the Road event.

Along with a few other speakers, we'll present sessions in Munich (May 21), Zurich (May 22), Paris (May 23), Brussels (May 24), and Amsterdam (May 25). See the tour dates page for details on the locations and agenda for each city.

Pretty sweet! :-) I always love going to Europe, and this will be my first time in Paris and Brussels. I'm certainly grateful to have been invited. I'll leave cf.objective on Saturday afternoon to fly right to Munich. Sadly, my wife couldn't join me (for reasons that I'll explain in a moment.)

Some may know the Scotch on the Rocks event has traditionally taken place in Edinburgh (where I had the pleasure to speak previously). And the "Scotch on the road" moniker has been used before when it's happened in another city or cities.

Hitting the road in a tour bus!

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Speaking this week at cf.Objective(): Two coldfusion sessions and a lightning round talk

Note: This blog post is from 2012. 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 a heads up for those at cf.objective, which starts tomorrow. I'll be presenting 3 times.

First, I'm giving two different sessions on Thursday and Friday:

See the links above for details on each talk. And as always, I'll post these talks (after presenting them) on my presentations page.

Then, on Thursday evening I'm giving a Lightning Round talk. Last year I did one on "Lies, Damned Lies, and Request Timeouts". This year, I will again do a CF-centric talk--someone has to talk about something other than beer, love, and other heartwarming or life-expanding talks. :-) This year, it will be "10 Things That Plague Most CF Servers, with Solutions". Yep, even in 6 minutes, I hope to share some surprises that many miss, but which I see daily in helping people in my CF server troubleshooting consulting services.

I'll be posting the presentation for that as well, but it will have additional detail (in terms of resources to learn more) on each topic.

Looking forward to seeing old friends and making new ones. Please come say hello, and be gentle with me if I may not make an immediate connection of face to name. :-) With the blessing of attending and speaking at so many conferences comes the curse of meeting lots of people, only briefly, and often only once (or once in a great while!)

Finally, I'll note I am also presenting the first two talks above again next week, in a 5-city European tour. More on that here: Speaking May 21-25 in 5-day European #ColdFusion Road Tour, Scotch on the Road.

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