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 Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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

But the CF Server Monitor does have an Achilles Heel: you may turn on one of its "start" buttons, especially "memory tracking", and find that it's crippling your server. You may not be able to then turn off the feature.

I talked about this potential issue in an entry when CF 8 was released back in 2007, CF Server Monitor: what's the impact on production? you may be surprised. I clarify there that the monitor will not, as some assert, "always kill your server". See that for more details.

And I discussed in an entry earlier today that you can't just "close the monitor" or even restart CF to make the problem go away, because that won't stop the functionality. See CF911: Using the #ColdFusion Server Monitor? Be aware that the "Start" buttons remain enabled.

So what if you are in a situation where using one of the features, especially typically "memory tracking", has in fact sent your server into a tizzy. If you can't even get into the monitor to turn it off, you're going to be in quite a pickle, and understandably panicked.

Easy solution if you're on CF 9.0.1

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 Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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

Why is this important? Well, I discussed the impact of these buttons (which can be severe or negligible, depending on certain factors) in a blog entry I wrote back in 2007 when CF8 was released.

And today someone was kind enough to point it out to someone on Twitter, so I took a look at it and tweaked it a bit to give some more context. While doing that, I realized I'd never mentioned this fact about the "start" buttons, and about an important related change in CF 9.01 (and 10), thus this entry.

The buttons remain enabled over CF restart or closing the monitor

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 Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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

Among the "other enhancements" mentioned at the bottom of the "New Features Notes" (PDF), note a few related to FTP:

• New Upload On Save option on the FTP connector dialog box to upload a file by way of FTP when saved locally
• Use shortcuts to perform Synchronize and Upload (Ctrl+Alt+W U)/Download (Ctrl+Alt+W D) simultaneously
• Take advantage of the shortcut for Synchronize (Ctrl+Alt+W Y)

Those may be big news for some, which might be easily missed, and which are not likely to be pointed out in most posts on what's new in CFB 2.0.1. And some would even intentionally leave them out, so I'm "takin' one for the community" here by pointing these out. :-)

Why some may decry these features

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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.

(This is a reprisal and update of an old blog entry I'd done back in 2003, on a blog site that will soon no longer exist. I'll be reprising a few such blog entries in coming days/weeks, to keep them around for posterity [and to save some having to dig for them in the archive.org site] since often the info offered then may be just as valuable now. I hope that in time these new versions would come up if people do searches that would have found the old entry.)

So, about these http headers, while CFML exposes them in a dump of the CGI scope, such as the user-agent field which shows up as cgi.http_user_agent, the issue is that you would not use that name, nor even "user_agent", when specifying it in a CFHTTPPARAM. The proper way to pass the user agent in a CFHTTPPARAM would be as follows:

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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.

Update: Great news. It turns out that just days before I wrote this entry in late 2011, Adobe had in fact addressed and resolved this problem (quietly, I'd say) by making security fixes written from Dec 2011 (apsb11-29) on now have 2 sets of steps, one for if you HAD applied the security hotfix previous to it, and one for if you HAD NOT. And this has proven to be the case for the next few, as I write this update in late 2012. So we can now consider them effectively "cumulative", for those from Dec 2011, on. You need only focus on the latest, and follow either of its 2 provided sets of steps.

That said, I'm not 100% sure if all those from Dec 2011 include all ones prior to that. Has anyone tested things to know?

I'll leave the rest of the note below here for posterity, but stricken out.

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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.

The good news is that the problem can be solved using the simple LOCALURL attribute. The bad news is that you have to do it at all, and that if you don't do it, it can have such unfortunate and unexpected impact. (And just as bad, again, is that hardly anyone has talked about it.) This entry will elaborate on the issue (and a couple of other possible CFDocument performance issues, as a bonus.)

I've been meaning to write about the importance of this problem and solution (the LocalURL attribute) for a long time (it came out in CF8). Often when I'm helping people with CF troubleshooting problems, whether on mailing lists or in my consulting services, I've been able to show that long-running requests (or an unexpectedly excessive number of requests) were sometimes due to this very problem.

Basics of the LocalURL attribute

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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.

Both CF 9.0 and 9.01 run on older JVMs (and therefore need this update). And are you on CF8? You're not left out: Adobe even has confirmed this update can be applied to CF 8 and 8.01, too!

Note: if you are finding this blog post because you're searching the web for help on updating the JVM that underlies ColdFusion, note that this is a very old post (2011) about one specific JVM version. Instead, for a more general discussion of updating the JVM, and especially about solving and preventing common problems when doing that, see my more "recent" (2014) and more elaborated post: CF911: 'Help! I've updated the JVM which ColdFusion uses, and now it won't start!'.

Still more updates since this originally was posted:

Update 1: Since I wrote this blog entry in Oct 2011, Adobe has since come out with a new technote in Oct 2012 saying that you are now permitted to update to any version of Java 1.6 (for CF 8/9/10).
Update 2: Since posting this note, I've realized I should document an important fact to be aware of if you DO update the JVM: after doing so, it may seem that changes you made to allow CFHTTP calls to SSL pages (or other tags in CFML that talk via SSL or TLS) may "seem to have been lost". The issue is likely that you had modified your current CF setup to import specific certificates for such sites, but those changes are "lost" when you change the JVM that CF is now using (which has its own keystore). But these cert changes can be recovered. For more on that, see the next to last section below.
Update 3: In Feb 2013, Adobe did come out with an update that authorizes moving to Java 1.7 in either 9 or 10. You must apply the update first, though. More in this Adobe blog entry.

Old news, but not everyone knows

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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.

Check out what the presentation I offered today, "What's Next In CF Zeus?" (PDF of slides), which I presented at CFCamp in Munich.

(I had mentioned last week that I would be presenting this and another presentation, as well as a daylong class. BTW, the daylong class was popular, with 13 students. Great to meet all those who attended.)

I explain in the slides how I gathered the info, from 5 public Adobe Zeus sessions I've seen so far. None of those had yet cataloged ALL features that had been shown in the other sessions. There were certain things mentioned in all 4, but then also each showed things (or in more detail) that the other did not. I enjoyed pulling this all together in this talk.

As I also note in the slides, I was not permitted to show live demos (only Adobe employees can do that), but still the listing of features and brief discussions (including some code) should still be valuable. I also point to the URLs for the 4 currently available recorded public Adobe sessions, which do in fact offer more code and live demos.

I suspect I'll offer the talk soon on the CFMeetup. I may also present them in another form. But until then, enjoy the slides.

Do let me know if it's a useful list for you, or if I left anything out!

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.

At the event, I'll be giving 3 talks. Well, two are sessions in the one-track conference, and one is a day-long class the day before.

The two session topics will be:

• What's Next In Zeus, aka CF10
• Continuously improve CF code quality, server availability & application stability

The descriptions for each of those is on that page for the conference program". As you'll also note there, the other speakers are Mark Drew, Gert Franz, Gary Gilbert, Luis Majano, and Bilal Soylu.

The day-long class I'll be doing (separately purchased, and nearly sold out) is:

• Understanding and Using FusionReactor 4 and FusionAnalytics

If you haven't heard, both Fusionreactor 4 and FusionAnalytics have been released in recent weeks. They're powerful tools that I help people use all the time in my independent CF troubleshooting consulting. If you haven't checked them out yet, do. And note the availability of both a live demo (nothing to download and install) and a free 10-day demo for each.

See you in Munich, or in the future

I'll note that I will likely give both the talks in other venues and formats (whether in-person or over the web) in the future. If you may be interested, let me know.

And if you'll be in Germany next week, I hope to see you there. (Sadly, my wife didn't get to come this time.)

Thanks to all the sponsors for helping make the event happen, for me and for all who will be attending.

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.

The "good" news is that there are at least a few really common explanations of what may have happened, which I'll explain them here. Once you consider them, you may find either that you can confirm this is what happened (and fix it), or if nothing else you can keep it in mind if you're ever applying them yourself in the future.

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