Tuesday, March 17, 2009

ColdFusion threads and hung servers

We had an issue today at work with ColdFusion brought to its knees by some unknown processes. The result was the error "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: unable to create new native thread"

As I often do when googling a CF issue, I wound up on TalkingTree. Through it I found an Adobe post where I learned that you can send a kill -3 to the cfusion process and it will cause a full thread dump in the cfserver.log file.

So it seems we may need to tweak the NewNativeThread [ThreadWaitTimeout (currently 180) and the MaxHandlerThreads (currently 1000)] by determining the root cause of the server slowness. But of course to do that the server needs to get in a slow state again so we can use the fun kill -3.

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