Thank You FusionReactor!
July 31, 2008
I've been having a bit of trouble with an install of ColdFusion 8.0.1 Standard where it would be running quite happily and then grind to a halt. At this point you couldn't even restart the service! The server itself seemed to be OK, plenty or RAM and the CPU high but nothing too excessive. The log files that coldfusion produces are next to useless if you happen to use a front-controller (which all the major frameworks do) as you don't get the URL parameters.
ColdFusion enterprise has a server monitor built-in which would have been useful, but considering the cost difference between Standard and Enterprise it would need to be pretty special. The one thing that bothers me about the ColdFusion Server Monitor is that it runs as ColdFusion, so when your server starts running slow and timing out, the chances are that so the Server Monitor is going to run slow or timeout.
This leaves three options; the cfstat command-line utility, Fusion Reactor and SeeFusion. I'll admit that I've never used cfstat, but as far as I know it only returns the script name which isn't much help with the front controller design pattern, but hey - it's free!
Fusion Reactor and SeeFusion both have pros and cons and cost pretty much the same. In the end I went for Fusion Reactor because it produces reports in HTML as well as flex charts. This is really handy when you want to copy and paste - it's the simple things that make a difference.
After running Fusion Reactor for a couple of hours I cured some long running requests (mostly caused by bots hitting pages without passing all the expected params) and tweaked the JVM heap settings. So far so good. Without Fusion Reactor I would never have got this kind of information so for a few hundred pounds/dollars you can save a lot of time and reduce the number of client phone calls. Now, that has got to be worth it!
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