CF2018 Http 500 Error upon startup, cache issue?

Jim, we appreciate your frustration. And as you see we don't want to give up as long as you want to keep going. I have a couple of thoughts. 

1) First, for the sake of other readers, there's never any guarantee that a tracker bug report will be fixed let alone verified, sadly. (And Lucee bugs have languished before, to be fair.)

2) But back to your problem, I wonder if you might have given up on my first idea too quickly, when you say you

'tried disabling the "Save Class Files" options and toasted all the files in the cfclasses directory'. 

First, I didn't say to  disable that "save class files" option. Indeed, I recommended specifically against that. (It should be on, for most people. It's rather rare situations where turning it off is better.)

3) But most important, when you say you "toasted" the files in  cfclasses, you don't clarify if you did stop cf first. That was an important point. Can you clarify?

The fact that clearing the template cache helps just calls into question if cf is somehow still loading some bad one. 

4) But if you did or do that and it still fails, then (like other idead BKBK and Dave have offered), I'd wonder if there is some sort of race condition unique to the server experiencing the problem, which leads to different execution of the flow of code.

That can be challenging to prove, but not impossible.

Step debugging might readily show a difference between one and another. I know some people would rather gargle broken glass than do that. Just saying it's an option, whether with cfbuilder (also in its free trial) or the interactive debugging in fr ultimate or its free trial.

And while some feel that's all too complicated to setup, it really isn't and I can help if you're interested.

5) Finally, are you saying this happens on startup even if there are no requests that have run? It's possible, but unlikely. Just have to ask.

And if it is after some run, there's still the idea Dave offered to pre-warm/pre-load the app before users would make a request. 

The error is likely caused by ColdFusion ORM being unable to resolve the following property defined in crms/model/beans/criterionTemplates.cfc

<cfproperty name="dotted.path.to.subsectionTemplate"... etc.>

If there is indeed such a property, could you please share its full definition.

I honestly don't know much about FW/1, which is what you're using. But in my experience, many CMSs and frameworks etc do a lot of caching before they can actually be used. I suspect that's what's happening here. Ideally, you need a process that

a) limits access to the web server

b) starts the web server and the application server

c) initiates the first request to the application server so that it'll start loading stuff into memory or whatever

d) when everything's loaded, opens access to the web server.

I used to do this manually quite a bit for CommonSpot applications that had a lot of caching upfront. But it could be automated pretty easily as long as you can make an accurate guess about when everything's loaded. IIS properties can be changed from PowerShell or batch files, or you could temporarily block access to IIS at the host-based firewall.

Dave Watts, Eidolon LLC

As an alternative to Charlie's suggestion: 

1) Open the ColdFusion Administrator and go to the Caching page;

2) Click on the buttons to clear the Template cache and the Component cache.

Do you still get the error?

I may have a quick fix for you. There's much more that could be said, but given what you say, can you  simply confirm first if your cf admin caching page shows the "save class files" option enabled? (It should, for production and indeed for most uses.)

Assuming it is, stop cf and go to the coldfusion folder and its cfusion subfolder (assuming you are running only that one instance), and then its

/wwwroot/WEB-INF/ folder. There 

rename the cfclasses folder (NOT classes) to something like cfclasses-old. Then restart cf. CF will create a new cfclasses folder on startup. 

If doing that solves things (no more error, and no more need to clear the template cache as a fix), then you somehow had bad class files in there, and they will be created anew (and loaded into the template cache in memory). The problem should NOT recur. 

If you wanr/need to know more, there's indeed more that could be said, but this may get you going. (And again, turning OFF "save class files" is not the right solution in nearly all cases.) 

Finally, if it does work you can delete that renamed cfclasses folder.