How to restart or reload the coldfusion web application

I usually restart a ColdFusion application by changing the value of this.name in the Application.cfc file.

For me, that is usually as simple as adding one character. For example, by changing 

<cfset this.name = "MyApp">

to

<cfset this.name = "MyApp2">

After you do that, the next request will restart the application, under the new name, MyApp2.

Dejank, there can be several things at issue here. But since you say you've used the admin to clear the template and component caches, we'll assume we need not speak of things like the "trusted cache" option (on that same page in the CF Admin). Otherwise, I wonder if you are storing CFCs in a shared scope, like application, session, or server. If so, that takes special handling.

First we should ask what "url parameter" you were trying to use that "does not work with all applications"? I ask because there is no such url parameter that works for "all cf apps" that I know of.

Instead, some people write code (such as in their application.cfc or cfm) which WATCHES for some sort of such "init" or "reset" sort of url variable and that they have that code trigger whatever they think will "reload" the app. Even that can mean different things to different people/apps.

One option is to call the built-in CFML function, applicationStop(). What that does is "stop" the app, such that then the next request which comes in will inherently trigger a reload of the "application" before that request, to include CF re-running the onapplicationstart method of an Application.cfc. Such a new request would reset the application scope, though not the session scope (so it WOULD clear any CFCs stored in the application scope, and any next instantion of that CFC would detect changes to that CFC). 

Others have such "reset" code call the onapplicationstart method of their application.cfc, which is not only not needed (if you do the above) but it's unwise: again, CF WILL call that on the next request that happens...and CF will also implicitly single-thread calls to that method, which does NOT happen if your code calls the method directly.

But again even that call to applicationstop() function will only cause removal of the application scope (and CFC instances stored there), but it would not affect the session (or server) scope. If you have stored CFC instances in those, then to get them to reload, you'd need to either clear the scope entirely (using structclear, which will clear the ENTIRE scope) or you could remove JUST the CFC from the scope--if you knew the name of the var/s holding the instance (using structdelete, naming the scope and the variable). Any next request which would call code to re-instantiate the CFC  WOULD then pick up any changes made to the CFC. And this is sometimes the kind of code people put into suh "init" code as discussed above.

But beware of a couple things: first, there could be an issue if between the time of clearing a scope and next loading a CFC into it, some other request  which only tries to USE the CFC instance but not RELOAD it would fail now that it's gone. And note also that there's no way (I know of) to clear/modify the session scopes for ALL users of an app, so you can't in any single step force reloading of such a changed CFC across all sessions, like you can with app or server scope.

If these things don't work for you, please do share more detail about what kind of code you're changing (cfc or cfm files), and whether any aspect of it is in any way connected to the startup of the application, and perhaps whether you know that the CFCs are (or are not) being loaded into any shared scope. Or maybe others will have better questions for you, if not solutions.