Large report crashes ColdFusion

[Todd in Italy]

Hello,

I have ColdFusion 2021 HF 12 running on Windows Server 2016, connecting to an SQL database and to Crystal Server 2020 for generating reports. Everything works without issue until I request a report over about 400 pages. In that case, CF crashes with a generic 500 error when trying to open the report returned from Crystal Server. I cannot find where in CF I can configure a larger buffer or transfer limit to allow the larger file. Any suggestions? The report will be about 600 pages in pdf format.

Thanks,
Todd

[faizank94658980]

Yes, you can try with increasing RAM limit into CF administrator.
It may occur due to Heap Memory Usage.

[Todd in Italy]

Thank you. It is clear that some RAM limit needs to be increased. It is unclear which setting to adjust CF admin page. I see settings for Max Output buffer which should not be relevant, Mem limit for in_mem VFS (unknown), mem limit per app for VFS (unknown), Max size of post data (seems likely). Do you know which of these is relevant to returned report data?

[faizank94658980]

Check attached file. Your server having enough RAM, and in CF21 administrator page in JAVA &JVM section if JVM heap size memory you are using default then please increase it. It may resolve your issue.  

[Todd in Italy · Accepted solution]

Ok trial ansd error. It was indeed Max size of post data. I increased it to 500Mb and the report no longer causes a 500 error.

[Charlie Arehart]

Todd, that's indeed interesting to hear. The ""Maximum size of post data"" field there in the CF Admin (and its related "Maximum number of POST request parameters" field) relate not to cf "trying to open the report returned from Crystal Server",  as you surmised the problem to be, but instead they're about limiting the max size of files or number of form fields that cf will allow to be posted to it. I gather you had some form that folks fill in and the RESULT of that form post is passed to Crystal. It seems (from your conclusion/answer) that THIS is what you were hitting. And glad you solved it, of course.

I'm not saying this merely to split hairs, but to inform you and readers, since you say you resolved this by trial and error. Note that if you were indeed hitting this form post limit (as it seems clearly you were), there will be an error indicating that in one of the cf logs.

I can confirm for both the post size limit and post parameters limit error, they're tracked in the server.log and coldfusion-out log (in my testing, back to CF11), and since CF2021 they're also now tracked in the exception.log.

FWIW, there's an error reported to the application.log or coldfusion-error.log ONLY if one has enabled CF's debug output--and in that case, what's being reported is an error in the debug output handler itself (such as /WEB-INF/debug/classic.cfm), which gets an error trying to handle the result of the error above. Odd, but beware. It also means that on-screen one might see a 500 error on screen (as you mentioned), though one could easily miss that it's reporting an error in that classic.cfm debug output template. If that's NOT enabled, one should see on-screen a 400 status error, reporting: "POST parameters exceeds the maximum limit" (for  exceeding CF's limit on the number of form fields) or "Post Size exceeds the maximum limit" (for exceeding CF's limit for max upload file size.)

(While we're on that detail, I'll add also that if one does a form post to CF by way of IIS, if the file size is over 30mb, then one would instead get an error from IIS, as it has its own size limit. Depending on various IIS and CF settings, you may see it show the error as, "HTTP Error 413.1 - Request Entity Too Large" and "The request filtering module is configured to deny a request that exceeds the request content length." FWIW, that's controlled via the IIS "Request Filtering" feature and its available "edit feature settings", to change "Maximum allowed content length (Bytes)", which defaults to 30,000,000.)

Anyway, I raise all this first to propose that you could now confirm (if you wanted to) that you WERE getting the error in the server.log or coldfusion-out.log BEFORE making the setting change. I do appreciate that having the problem solved is the main goal. So I share the rest also as much for the sake of others who may find it, trying to understand the problem and these variations. 🙂 

PS I've revised my comment here since first posting it several hours ago, as I had time to explore and confirm the details about logging, what's shown on screen, the differences in versions, etc.