CFContent failing on large files since moving to ColdFusion 9

http://www.bennadel.com/blog/1227-Using-ColdFusion-To-Stream-Files-To-The-Client-Without-Loading-The-Entire-File-Into-Memory.htm

Better solution than working on memory issues. Check this link for Ben's solution.

To fix this:

1. Login to the administrator panel for Coldfusion 9.x
2. Choose Java and JVM
3. Set the "Maximum JVM Heap Size  (MB) " to 1024 or appropriate value. Old value was 512 MB and seems to not be enough.
   
4. Restart Coldfusion services.

Seems to be an with memory needed for Java and I was able to download large files afterwards on my 64-bit OS with CF 9.01.

Enjoy.

Jon Almada

This has caused me a bit of a nightmare. When you upgrade versions, you expect things to at least improve. This has to be a priority fix - it's a howling problem!

Anyhow, for the benefit of others in a similar situation, I eventually got around this by creating a read-only FTP account (literally read-only - the user can't even list files/directories) on our web server and then I use a cflocation redirect instead of the cfcontent approach to serve up the file. I use UUIDs as folder names, so it's a pretty safe way of stopping people from downloading content they shouldn't.

So, instead of this...

<cfset Path = "#pathToMyFile#\#myFileName#"> <cfset FileInfo = GetFileInfo(Path)> <cfset FileSize = FileInfo.size> <cfset MimeType = getPageContext().getServletContext().getMimeType(Path)> <!--- Sometimes doesn't work, so we need to check that MimeType exists below ---> <cfheader name="Content-Disposition" value="attachment; filename=""#myFileName#"""> <cfheader name="Expires" value="#Now()#"> <cfheader name="Content-Length" value="#FileInfo.size#"> <cfif IsDefined("MimeType")>      <cfcontent type="#MimeType#" file="#Path#" deletefile="No"> <cfelse>      <cfcontent type="application/octet-stream" file="#Path#" deletefile="No"> </cfif>

I now have this...

<cfset FTPDownloadLink = "ftp://myAnonymousUser@ftp.mydomain.com/myFTPPath/#myFileName#"> <cflocation url="#FTPDownloadLink#" addtoken="no">

I suspect that this is actually a better way of doing things anyway, since it offloads responsibility to serving the file from the CF server to the FTP, which is, after all, what it is designed to do.

Firstly, I think you should o vote for the bug that's been raised to cover this:

http://cfbugs.adobe.com/cfbugreport/flexbugui/cfbugtracker/main.html#bugId=83425

I've not played with this at all, but it looks to me like this is similar to a thing older versions of CF used to have when serving up files with <cfcontent>: the whole file gets loaded into RAM, and only then spooled back to the browser.

I wonder if it would be possible to just used <cfcontent> to set the MIME type, and then used <cfflush interval="somethingSensible">, fileRead() or fileReadBinary() and <cfoutput> to read&spool the file at the same time?  This might also be quicker given the data is being spooled at the same time as it's being read, rather than being done in series.

That said... this is entirely speculation on my part... amn't in the position to test this approach at the mo', sorry.

--

Adam