neo-cron.xml keeps getting re-written as blank object

Report · Jun 21, 2011

Windows Server 2008, Coldfusion 9 (32-bit)

Not sure why, but the neo-cron.xml keeps getting re-written to become a 0 byte file. (This file takes care of the scheduler tasks.) It was fine before the 9.0.1 upgrade. Whenever I can't log into the Coldfusion administrator, I need to reload the file from my backup copy, save it and reboot Coldfusion Service.

For those that need a basic neo-cron.xml file because you do not have a backup, I was able to get one from the Internet. Simply use notebook and copy this into the neo-cron.xml located at /Coldfusion9/lib/

After you restore your scheduled tasks, be sure to copy it some place where you can restore it from.

It would be nice if I did not have to restore this every few weeks. If anyone has some ideas as to why, I am open to testing.

Report · Jul 21, 2017

Hey there..... I have been using CF for 20 years and I am all of a sudden my net-cron.xml file is experiencing the same thing every few days. Anyone help??? Thanks

Report · Jul 21, 2017

Are you finding that this is happening when CF is crashing? That's what I usually see. I'd focus on why it is, and fix that. There may be other negative implications of such crashes.(Solving such problems is what I do for a living, if you find you need help resolving it.)

All that said, I do wish Adobe would do a better job preserving and recovering the file when it happens.

/Charlie (troubleshooter, carehart. org)

Report · Aug 30, 2017

The reason behind the file getting truncated to zero length is due to the file holding the definition AND state. Every time a task fires the file gets saved with changes to the task that just fired for values such as Last Run, # repeats remaining, Remaining Count...et al.

Once you have many tasks that run at similar times file access contention becomes an issue for the neo-cron.xml. I have a system with over 200 tasks in CF scheduler and some of those run every minute, we get corrupted files frequently. Why storage of the state can't be stored outside of the configuration file, I'm not sure -- a DB would be ideal....

Anyways -- I have a system ( non-cf ) task that copies the file once a day to a backup and once a week it makes a archive copy so that I can rollback when a corruption happens ( and it WILL happen ). I have a second task that checks the file size, and if I got five minutes with a zero - file size on neo-cron I have the system kill CF, copy over my most recent backup, start CF, and send me an email.

I suggest you consider coming up with a similar solution, as this has been an issue for MANY generation of the product. The other solution, that we will be changing to, is to use an external task engine.

Report · Oct 11, 2017

Great point, rgid.

It would seem that one way Adobe could alleviate this problem would be to have two separate files about tasks: one being the DEFINITION of each task, and the other being about the STATE OF LAST EXECUTION of each task.

Right now, since both things are tracked in the one neo-cron.xml file, it is all the more likely that corruption which happens due to a crash while CF is tracking the STATE of a running task would then break the more important details about the DEFINITION of all tasks.

It's like good normalization of a database. I've gone ahead and opened a feature request, if others reading this may want to vote on it: https://tracker.adobe.com/#/view/CF-4200009

/Charlie (troubleshooter, carehart. org)