Recently I presented Homebrewed ColdFusion Monitoring to the Twin Cities CFUG and to the Online ColdFusion Meetup.  Both presentations went well and I've been asked to post my slides and example code. 

*UPDATE* - I just uploaded a new zip file with corrected code that actually works this time.

I am excited to announce that I've been invited to speak on December 10th at 6pm CST about writing your own ColdFusion monitoring tools at the Online ColdFusion Meetup that is run by Charlie Arehart.  Below is part of the announcement and links to the Meetup site and meeting URL.  If you missed the presentation I gave at the TwinCites CFUG or just want to see it again, please join us for this Meetup.

Thank you,

Wil

What: "Homebrewed ColdFusion Monitoring ", with Wil Genovese
WHEN: Thurs. Dec 10, 6:00pm US ET (UTC/GMT-5)
MEETING URL: http://experts.acrobat.com/cfmeetup/
DURATION: Approx. 1 hour
Meeting will be recorded. URL will be posted after meeting at http://recordings.coldfusionmeetup.com
What time is the meeting in your timezone? (shows the time as US ET, and you can choose your city from the list offered to see what time that is in your own timezone)

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Sitting at Chris & Rob's Chicago's Taste Authority in St. Paul, MN sipping a Goose Island 312 wheat beer, eating a couple of Chicago dogs and preparing my presentation for Homebrewed ColdFusion Monitoring.  I am happy to say the Twin Cities ColdFusion User Group (http://www.colderfusion.com) has asked me to talk about the ColdFusion Monitoring tools I've written and use at work. I've just accepted their invitation to present and I hope to see you there.

I will be updating these tools for ColdFusion 9 and I hope to have a basic standalone app ready to go by the time I give my presentation.  (The version I wrote for work is custom for our servers and not portable.)

The Twin Cities CFUG meets the first Wednesday of every month. This meeting will be on November 4th at 6:30 pm with pizza and socializing at 6:00pm.

See you there!
 

A long time ago I wrote a bash shell script to monitor ColdFusion 7 and issue a restart if the CF server hung itself or was about to run out of memory.  I posted info on this script at House of Fusion back then. Today I am still getting requests for this script so I am finally posting the script files to my blog (which I didn't have back then).  

Repost from HOF:

My bash script does two things.  It checks a specified URL for a certain string to see if CF is still responsive and it also calls a cf script which reports back an integer that is the amount of free JVM memory left.

If a hang situation is detected the script will pause for a specified amount of time and

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I've been reading more and more posts lately asking which version of the JVM should I use with ColdFusion x.xx?  This can be a big question, but it does get narrowed down a bit by the version of ColdFusion you are running and the known bugs in the JVM versions.

ColdFusion 7.xx

Lets start with ColdFusion 7.xx.  For years Macromedia and Adobe claimed that if you used anything other than the officially supported versions of the JVM you would not receive any support.  The problem is that the officially supported versions list never kept up with the updates from Sun.  This was a problem since Sun fixed many nasty bugs and performance issues, but Adobe still only  recognized the same old and buggy JVM versions.  So which version do I use?  When running version 7 of ColdFusion I won't use anything less than 1.4.2_13.  Anything before that, in my opinion and experience, is too buggy and unstable for high load applications.  The 'newest' version is 1.4.2_19 and unless there is a security update or something else very major, Sun won't be updating the 1.4 line any more. End of life was declared last October 30, 2008.  The last version I remember using was 1.4.2_17.

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