A

Anonymous

Question

COLD FUSION SUCKS!

Forum|Forum|18 years ago
April 27, 2007
14 replies
3110 views

Ok I have been a web developer for 10 years now and have been using Coldfusion since version 4.0. I must say that I am completely over this product. Unfortunately now I must learn how to develop sites using another language because I only know Cold Fusion. I have basically wasted 10 years of my life with this product.

Here is my case.
We have been experiencing performance issues with CFMX for the past year we had been running version 6.1. Recently we installed a brand new server with what should be way more than enough processor and RAM to support our Cold Fusion applications at the same time we upgraded to CFMX7. We had thought this would resolve our issues however it has been a mear 2 months and my headaches are back. On top of it Adobe wants to charge $10,000 to support a product that I paid $1400 for. I do not recommend anyone using Cold Fusion for any high end or even mid level application development. Don't waste your time because Cold Fusion cannot handle it and evidently Adobe does not support their customers. I have done extensive research and have dug through these forums an uncountable amount of times trying to find a resolution to the CFMX server performance issue and have seen many other people with the same issues and no response or support from Adobe. I think the underlying issue is in fact Java and the Java engine as these performance issues were not as evident in the pre Java days.

Now I have about 500 websites all using Cold Fusion and I have to decide what to do to fix this problem. I should in fact be charging Adobe for my time over the past year in dealing with the headaches there product has caused me and for the lack of support offered. Does anyone in their right mind pay $10,000 for support?

It is clearly evident that Adobe does not care about Cold Fusion or their clients that use this product. I have spent thousands of dollars over the years upgrading every time there is a new release does that not count for anything.

I am venting my frustration here because I have no other way of contacting Adobe unless I pay $10,000.
If you are experiencing these performance issues such as Service Unavailable and pages timing out for no reason please reply to this thread and let Adobe know maybe, just maybe they will do something about it. Until then I guess I will start teaching myself .net or some other language so I can provide my clients with better service in the future.

Just so you know my main web application is an online ecommerce web site getting a mear 3600 hits a day. The site uses Cold Fusion exclusively and connects to SQL server which is on a separate server from the web sites. You would think that Cold Fusion could handle such a minor site easily. I have also created multiple application pools in my IIS to help handle the multiple threads a bit better. I have tons of hard drive space, 4 gigs of RAM a dual processor 2.8ghz motherboard and my servers are connected to eachother on a private LAN using gigabyte ethernet cards. Not sure how much more advanced the hardware can be than what I have. I have already made all of the suggested tweaks to the memory variables that I found in the forums all to no avail.

Unless Adobe does something to support their Cold Fusion customers real soon I will begin a Cold Fusion Sucks campaign of my own and do what I can to deter anyone else from becoming a victim of this poor product. It ails me to do so because I have been an avid supporter of Cold Fusion over the years and have defended Cold fusion on many occasions but I am at my wits end now.

Getting started

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T

Tariq_Ahmed__ACP_

Participating Frequently

Hey Flux3000 - sorry to hear about your problems. I inherited a massive ultra poorly written MISSION CRITICAL application...where if it doesn't work, the business goes out of business. When I came in to take over from a former team, the app was crashing constantly, locking up, etc... We get about 50000 hits a day and a SQL Server DB sized at 130GB.

So, we systematically piece by piece identified all the issues and began to fix them. For example we brought in heavy duty SQL Server talent, as well as a freelance consultant to identify the bottlenecks... For example a lot of indices needed to be created; and then have a SQL Server maintenance plan in place (e.g. we have scripts that'll re-index all indices during the night).

Another thing was to make sure SQL Server and CF was configured to leverage the available memory. E.g. by default I think SQL Server is set to only use up to 1GB, we changed that to use up as much as possible - that allows it to cache more. And on the CF side, caching as many queries as possible, big template cache, caching as much data in App and Session vars, etc...

We installed a product called SeeFusion (there's another one similar called Fusion Reactor) that let's you monitor in real time what your CF server is going, and can be configured to log when queries and pages run longer than whatever threshold you want. Using this, it helped us see what the worst queries and pages were dragging down the system...and work on fixing them.

Because a bad running page... can cause a domino effect and cause a JVM traffic jam essentially - which will make what you described as simple pages seem like they're running unusually slow.

So other than logging those rogue pages and queries so that you can analyze them later, it also let's you monitor things in real time. So what I did is made a little monitoring tool that let's me monitor all our websevers so that then the running request load is nearing the max allowed requests running, or memory is getting too high, # of sessions, and a bunch of other metrics... it'll send out warning and alert sounds (so that I can minimize the app, but jump in if it starts alarming) - which let's me kill a rogue page in SeeFusion before the entire server locks up and other users get impacted.

You're welcome to try it out, SeeFusion isn't needed to use it, but there's only a smaller set of stuff I can get. http://www.cflex.net/flexmon.

A third benefit of using SeeFusion is you can then do long term trending. E.g Avg Page time, or week by week analysis to see if the bad boy pages are getting worse are slower... and then you can prioritize where to spend your speed improvement efforts...

So in doing all of this, we took an almost unusable application that used to simply time out from running too long.. and when it didn't time out, pages taking 1-3 minutes to load was common - to now where the average page time is less than 1 second. We also put in a load balancer, a clustered high availability SQL Server, upgraded to CF7, etc... It took about a year to do this (mostly because we were also focused on adding new functionality at the same time).

So I hope that that gives you some starting points to begin tackling your problem, and if there's anything I can do to help feel free to email me directly at tariq (at) dopejam.com.

One thing I can confidently say is that the CF community is very helpful, and we're all here to help each other succeed.

Cheers!

BKBK

Braniac

Can anyone give me some advice for a simple form?
Yes. Start your own thread.

A

Anonymous

I bought MX back in 2002. I had a couple of people tell me it was easy to use, which for me, I am having trouble with it. I use fatcow.com to place my domain, g3pl.com. I would like to set up a database that is entered through a webform, but I cannot get it to work. They have front page extensions, but they cannot help me with dw. The gave me a link to a page that helped with an email form, but no databases are generated.

Can anyone give me some advice for a simple form? It can be saved in CVS, MDB, XLS, TXT, or DBF. This is my humble site

A

Anonymous

Wilgeno,

I have experimented with tweaking the JVM settings and made some of the other adjustments as per some of the other replys to my thread and they seemed to have helped.

I ran the code analyzer in CF7 and it did not return any problems. I have been running much of the same code for many years and never had problems until a few months ago.

A part of my issue may be my dB the main dB is over 2 gigs now so I am sure that is probably creating some issues. Many of my queries are run from stored procedures so the load on CF is lightened some.

The main issue I have now is it seems that CF hangs up on occassion and I can usually recify it quickly by going to the task manager and killing jrun.exe however this causes CF application server to restart and CF seems to be taking quite some time to start. The other problem I am having is that when the server boots up CF does not start even though it is set to automatic I still have to go into the services panel and start it myself.

BKBK

Braniac

Ok I have been a web developer for 10 years now and have been using Coldfusion since version 4.0. I must say that I am completely over this product. Unfortunately now I must learn how to develop sites using another language because I only know Cold Fusion. I have basically wasted 10 years of my life with this product.

The relationship's gone sour. It's probably time for a divorce.

Unless Adobe does something to support their Cold Fusion customers real soon I will begin a Cold Fusion Sucks campaign of my own and do what I can to deter anyone else from becoming a victim of this poor product. It ails me to do so because I have been an avid supporter of Cold Fusion over the years and have defended Cold fusion on many occasions but I am at my wits end now.

Not the best way to go about that divorce.

A

Anonymous

flux3000, I don't think you can open up single-paid ($500) case using web site. Please call our Customer Service at 1-800-833-6687 when you are ready to open this ticket.

W

Wilgeno_wnt

Inspiring

All I can say is that the learning curve to tune the JVM on CFMX 7.0x is a bit steep. However, once you have the JVM tuned and your code debugged and the DB properly tuned (proper indexes and such), CF can run at amazing levels of load. Our current setup is a single server with 4gig's of memory and two dual core CPU's. We are running a single instance of CF in the standard installation mode on top of Red Hat with Apache. We routinely serve up 1.5 million page views per day. We have CF setup to handle up to 100 simultaneous requests and for a good part of today (5/21/07) we were at that limit. We even kicked it up to 150 simultaneous requests for a few hours to handle today's very high peek traffic. All in all CF did pretty good. We are now starting to hit the limit of a single server setup and we've already purchased all the hardware for load balancing and clustering. We are currently configuring and testing the new setup.

So, if your load isn't anywhere near what we have then I am willing to bet the issue is in at least one of three places. The JVM config, the code, the DB. For us, when we first migrated to CFMX 7 we had issues in all three areas.

If your website traffic is similar to ours or well beyond, then maybe you've done all the tuning you can and need to starting thinking about clustering.

Some other interesting tidbits. We have about 100 data sources at the moment and that is increasing. At any given time we will see between 1500 and 2500 CF Applications running. On average (24 hour period) we see about 20 simultaneous CF requests per second and about 120 DB requests per second. Our JVM is configure for about 1 gig of memory and we normally run at 50% JVM memory usage.

A

Anonymous

umuayo I have done what you suggested. I will monitor CF to see if it helps. If notI will try what scooter5791 suggested. If that does not help I will have to open a ticket.

Thanks for the help guys

U

umuayo

Inspiring

Flux3000

In the CF Admin Data and Services, check if you are using Flex Integration!!! If you are not and it is checked, disable it by unchecking it. That should help keep JRUN in check

A

Anonymous

flux3000, one thing I can tell you right away - you do not need to pay $10,000 to get support. You can open up single support ticket which costs $500 and then we will work with you on your problem. We do have customers with performance problems similar to yours, but each case is unique and problem cause is also different from case to case. I do not guarantee you that we will be able to find the source of the problem, but if we do not, Adobe offers consulting services. Somebody will come on site and for 3 or 5 days will do code and configuration review as well as performance tuning. Even that option I believe is less than 10 grand. But in majority of cases Support will be able to fine tune your performance and help you with the problem you experience. Have you tried to open up any cases with us?

A

Anonymous

I could not figure out how to open a support ticket without paying the $10,000. Can you guide me to the proper page?

Thanks.

tclaremont

Inspiring

If you happen to have duplicate email addresses in your database, it would send it twice to the same email if you are merely looping.

One idea is to query for DISTINCT email addresses before sending the mail.

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