Upgrade CF 9 to 9.01?

[richardELeach]

I'm running a VPS Windows Server 2008 (R2), IIS 7.5 and CF9, MySQL. It's a beefy box as I have lots of disk space and 8 GB of RAM.

I run into a major slow down on the box every so often, and I think I narrowed it down to app pools and Microsoft's handling of memory (or lack thereof). The Task Manager peaks out intermittently at 100% but I can't seem to identify 1 particular process that runs away. I set each app pool to recycle nightly starting at 1am (staggered by a few mins so that all sites don't recycle at the same time). That seemed to help reduce the frequency of these slow-downs but I'm still experiencing the odd slow down that seems to affect all users on the box; all sites come to a crawl. Sometimes I restart the box, other times I can just let it run. The log files show no errors, warnings.... actually they aren't very helpful at all.

I only remote desktop into the box, I'm not running Plesk or any other control panel app to conserve resources for my users. My suspicion is that it could be a ColdFusion or a MySQL issue, particularly as I'm still running CF 9 (have NOT yet upgraded to 9.01 as I can't get any clarity on how to do that from Adobe without possibly nuking my entire server configuration).

Has anyone upgraded CF from 9 to 9.01 on Windows Server 2008 (R2) without blowing up their configuration? I actually called into Adobe Support twice on how to do this upgrade, the first time the tech honestly sounded a little confused, then the second tech gave me different instructions. Not the "warm-and-fuzzy" I was hoping for....

Thanks in advance,

Rich

[carl type3]

Hi Rich,

You got a couple things going on there in this thread. If I read you correctly:

1) Apps slow down
2) To upgrade from CF 9.0.0 to 9.0.1 or not

1)
Is it JRun (ie CF) that is getting %100 bound? Perhaps add "CPU time" to Win Task Manager - Process tab, tick show all users and View > Select Columns > tick CPU time. Is JRun accumulating a lot of time, versa say other processes?

You say logs are not helpful. Have you looked in CF\runtime\logs\EVENT and OUT (Jrun4\logs if multiserver) logs at the time when apps slow down?

2)
I am not sure I want to comment perhaps I give you a bad steer and since you may apply what I said your server is broken. Seems to me you have valid reasons to be concerned. I have never particularly had a problem the process normally being is it CF 9.0.0 then run updater1 being aware of where CFIDE folder is located and able to stop CF, IIS and WWW services.

Perhaps someone else will be more aware of what the CF9.0.1 issue is for you and will comment.

HTH, Carl.

[Charlie Arehart]

I'll add first that there should be no problem updating from 9.0 to 9.0.1. That's what 9.0.1 is, an "updater" for 9.0. It won't "nuke" your current installation--it will simply upgrade it.

What are your concerns, Rich? What's got you at all hesitant?

Second, as for the problems, Carl's made the right first recommendation: see what's in the "out" logs (or if one was on *nix, the server.log). They often explain things that never show up in the traditional CF logs (application, exception, etc.).

Beyond that, the next most valuable tool is one that will tell you whether any requests are running. You can use something simple like CFSTAT, the free command line tool in CF Standard or Enterprise Server deployments (not multiserver or J2EE). Better is the CF Server Monitor (if on CF Enterprise), as it can tell not just how many requests are running but what they are.

You can also get that info with either FusionReactor (on any edition of CF, Railo, or OpenBD) or SeeFusion (on any edition of CF). Both also offer features to log what's going on in the environment, when you may not be watching.

And all three tools (Server Monitor, FusionReactor, and SeeFusion) offer an alerting feature to watch for certain circumstances (like requests being slow, or too many requests at once, or too little heap memory remaining), which can send you additional detail about requests running at the time of the alert. Those details can generally help one nail what the real root cause is.

(Sometimes, you can also find that the problem is CF is a victim, and that the hung CF requests are hung because they're waiting for something outside of CF, like a CFQUERY to a database, or a CFHTTP or web service invocation to a remote server, etc.)

Hope that's helpful.

/charlie arehart

charlie@carehart.org

Providing fast, remote, on-demand troubleshooting services for CF (and CFBuilder)

More at http://www.carehart.org/consulting

[richardELeach]

Thanks for your responses. My hesitancy is the amount of work I had to go through to actually get CF 9 working with IIS 7.5. None of the connectors or configuration was handled by the CF installer and I had to go in after the fact to get those to work manually via adding extensions through the Add Module Mappings interface of IIS. My fear is that 9.0.1 will "undo" this (or anything else regarding IIS 7.5) and cause me downtime.

I'll think I'll head down the road of trying to observe where and when the ColdFusion server is getting hung up and see if I can find a real time issue. The IIS logs aren't all that helpful even though they seem to report every little thing (I'm obviously not an IIS admin).

Thanks again for your suggestions as you've given me some directions to pursue. I'll keep you posted on my progress.

Rich

[carl type3]

Good Day,

I see Adobe have released an update to the June patches refer:

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/907/cpsid_90784.html

HTH, Carl.

Sorry guys I meant to post this in another thread.