upgrading the jre used by coldfusion

Question

i i have a coldfusion 8.1 application. it gets heavy use and i see jrun.exe getting very high memory usage in the task manager. this is a 32-bit windows 2003 server. when jrun gets around a gig of memory usage coldfusion will stop responding at some point. the logs are a little vague, but i start to see garbage collection and heap errors in the coldfusion log. i assume that the jre is running out of memory.

i have the max jvm heap set to 1.2gig. after some experimenting, this seemed to be the biggest amount i could allocate and still have coldfusion start ok. i realize that going to 64-bit might solve the problem, but that is not an option at this time.

i am considering upgrading the jre (it is at v6.x dated pre-2008, though i don't know the exact version. i am using the jre that came with coldfusion 8.1. has anyone gone through this? i assume its just a matter of installing the new jre and pointing coldfusion to the new jre directory in the coldfusion server settings.

tia don

Answer 1

Adobe has a Knowledge Base that covers issues like this. Check out http://www.adobe.com/go/2d547983 for instructions.

Sean Corfield has an article that provides some info on using Java 6 with ColdFusion 8 here: http://corfield.org/blog/index.cfm/do/blog.entry/entry/Java_6_and_ColdFusion_8

As long as you install 1.6.0_10 or greater, you should be fine. You might check out ColdFusionBloggers.org from time to time in case other JVM issues come to light in the future.

Answer 2

it's EXTREMELY easy to do.

1) download the Java SE Development Kit and install it like normal.

2) open up the jmv.config for cf in a text editor, located in c:\coldfusion8\runtime\bin

3) comment out the existing java.home line with a by putting a "#" at the beginning of the line add a new java.home line below it pointing to your jvm installation.

As an example, my java.home and jvm.config look like this: java.home=C:/Program Files/Java/jdk1.6.0_11/jre

4) restart the CF services.

As a bonus, you can running JavaRa and free up some space by deleting all the old versions of the JRE.

Answer 3

You didn't specify whether or not you were using the stand-alone server instance or a multi-server configuration. If you're getting a heavy volume of traffic and have a dual core machine with a lot of physical memory, I would consider looking into the multi-server set-up for CF8 and putting together a cluster with load balancing. This will help to distribute your traffic across several instances of CF8 and, assuming you have a beefy server, make better use of the physical resources that you have available.

-Rick