CF 8: Stops running at night??

Sounds liek maybe a firewall issue. Some firewalls have service availablity times. Just a thought.

Jim, I just noticed one other thing you'd said: "during these times, calls to the web services never return any data"

So, that's potentially still another issue. It wasn't clear if you were saying any other CF requests were running. I focused on your saying "the site was unavailable", so can you report if other CF requests did run?

Also, what may help you too is to see what the web services would respond with if requested directly in the browser. Many don't realize you can request a CFC as a web service on the browser, which can help to confirm if/how it responds.

If you had a test.cfc with a method called getdata, that took an argument of myarg and a value of 1, you could request that on the browser using http://yourserver/yourpath/test.cfc?wsdl&method=getdata&myarg=1. If you need to pass in other arguments with simple values (text, numbers), just keep adding them.

Finally, you could also use a debugging Flash player or proxy tools like Charles to watch what traffic is going from/back to your Flex browser client. I list several such proxies in a resource I keep, http://www.cf411.com/#proxy.

Jim, no, there are no features to set "windows of availability" for CF. So either CF was up and responding, or it wasn't. Even if it was, it may also be that your problem was with IIS.

The first thing I'd do is check the Event Log (Application) to see if CF was indeed up or down. Look for event ids 3 and 4 for the "source" being the name for your CF server as shown in the event viewer. Then I'd check if the web server itself may have gone down, using the same approach (though it's less likely). I'd also check the Event Logs (application or system) for any indications that the IIS application pool(s) may have have gone down. It's not unusual for the pools to recycle, but being down for an extended period may point out a web server problem (by which CF often gets blamed unfairly).

If that's not the issue, I'd then check the IIS logs, to see if indeed requests were being processed during that time. When people say "the server is down", that just means their requests were not processed. It may well be up and processing other requests. You'd also want to check whether cfm or other extensions were being processed at the time, their status codes, and the time-taken for each request (if enabled for the log in the properties for the site in IIS).

And when people report that it is "down", I'd also run requests using CF's built-in web server if it is/was enabled. If it responds on that web server, but not IIS, then that confirms a problem either with IIS or the web server connector between CF and it. The default port for CF's built-in web server is 8300, 8500, or some variation like it, depending on the version of CF and other things. You can confirm if it's enabled and what port it would be by looking in the jrun.xml file. For more info, see resources like http://livedocs.adobe.com/coldfusion/7/htmldocs/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=ColdFusion_Documentation&file=00001752.htm.

I realize you mention that these are web services requests coming in. But as far as CF and IIS are concerned, those are regular requests, so they go through the same web server process and CF request queue. (You don't mention what version of CF you have--whether 6, 7, or 8--and whether it's Standard or Enterprise. In CF8 Enterprise, there is a new feature to give web services requests their own set of request threads. You can see that in the CF Admin "Request Tuning" page.)

Finally, I'll point out that besides the web server logs, this is a problem that would be well served by having a tool like FusionReactor (fusion-reactor.com) and its great logging features that track all kinds of details about each page request. Of course, it's a great monitor and notification tool, with optional request protection features as well.

I'll say in closing that if anyone has problems like the above and would like some help (someone looking over your shoulder to help you solve such problems), I'm happy to provide that sort of support, as discussed at carehart.org/consulting. But as you can see above, I'm also happy to share the info for people who prefer to solve problems on their own.