CFMX 6.1 - false file not found error msg?

[sknyppy]

I came into work yesterday morning to find a specific '.cfm' page missing from our intranet.
The page was displaying a 404 find not found error msg even though the file was there in the proper location
As it has been for the last year. I restarted CFMX and suddenly it found the page again.

What the hell is going on? We are currently halting our cfm development and moving towards JSP because of
Unexplained issues like this that seem to occur on a regular basis.


Thank You.
Dave

 

[csteinhilber]

Not to put too fine a point on it... but what does it matter if you've already written off ColdFusion as being problematic and are moving toward replacing it?

But, analyzing your issue rationally... 404 errors come from the web server, not ColdFusion. In general, if there was a problem with ColdFusion, the page would be pulled up, just the CFML wouldn't be processed. Thus, I think the problem is actually rooted in your web server. In which case, even if you switch to JSP, if you don't fix the issue with the underlying web server you're probably going to have the same problem with .jsp pages suddenly not being found.

If you really want to track down causes of these types of issues, you can certainly build monitoring tools fairly easily that give you a snapshot of memory and resource usage as well as thread, request, cache and queue activity (look at the ColdFusion

GetMetricData("PERF_MONITOR")

function).

Once we began implementing tools and monitoring the health of the server on a regular basis, a) we found that 99% of the issues we were seeing were actually caused by our own poor coding practices, and b) once those practices were cleaned up, we have seen very few issues since.


-Carl

 

[sknyppy]

Well the problem must have been with Cold Fusion because when I restarted the CF service, the page came right up.

I would much rather use CF over JSP. JSP is a pain....

 

[csteinhilber]

Ehhhh... with ordinary software you could probably make that assumption... but with a web and app server, the line gets a little murky.

When you restarted ColdFusion and your page came up, it doesn't necessarily mean that the restart "fixed" ColdFusion... it could also mean that bouncing ColdFusion kicked the web server in the butt and said "hey, pay attention to me again, would ya?!?" or "pay attention to the files with my specific MIME type again".

There's a slight possibility that ColdFusion is the culprit, but it's far from a "must be". As I said, it's highly unusual that ColdFusion would return a 404... as it's not the one that actually tries to find the file. The web server finds the file and hands it off to ColdFusion to process the content.


-Carl