CF and IIS Reset Together?

[mprest]

Wouldn't it be a good idea to restart ColdFusion and reset IIS during a CF outage? This assumes all web sites are CF-based.

[ke4pym]

Why? The two have nothing to do with each other.

Unless the connector has died, I wouldn't bother IIS.

[BKBK]

To give IIS a gentle tap, right-click on the site in the IIS snap-in, and press
Refresh. To give it a nudge, right-click on the site's application pool and
press Recycle. All said, take Ke4pym's advice.

[RelentlessMike]

I disagree, but I suppose it depends on what environment you work in. I work
in a webhosting datacenter and at any given time there are multiple alerts on
the monitors. I have seen plenty of instances where restarting ColdFusion by
itself didn't bring a site back up, and I just don't have the time to not
restart both and wait to see if just restarting ColdFusion was enough.

Mike

[ke4pym]

I too have seen times where restarting CF doesn't bring the site back up. But
9 times out of 10 (especially with the MX series) the connector has died.

I've gathered my observations by looking at the logs for the connector and the
CF logs (as well as JRun logs) during and after an outage.

And when the connector dies, you don't have to necessarly restart all of IIS.
Just that web site (assuming you've got more than one virtual host on the
machine).

Just because CF dies doesn't mean you have to automagically restart IIS (or
any other web server you may be running at the time). If you do, you've got
problems elsewhere and should probably address them.

[mprest]

I support multiple CF sites and servers. I've seen two levels of CF failures;
one where restarting CF gets the sites back, the second where you have to
restart CF and reset IIS.

At 3AM, when CF (JVM) bombs, my idea was to use a monitor like NetIQ,
ipMonitor, What'sUpGold to restart CF and reset IIS. On servers with only CF
sites, it would seem logical to reset everything (CF and IIS). Since the JVM is
crapped, all sites are shot.

I wanted to automate the restart process so I can get all the sites up as
quickly as possible.

One thing I have noticed as well is that IIS does recycle apps, i.e.
ColdFusion automatically. It was curious to see in my CF Server logs
(cf_folder\logs\server.log) where ColdFusion was restarted and I didn't restart
it.

[ke4pym]

See, here's the thing, if you've got a straight ColdFusion site, IIS doesn't do
jack. It hands the request off to the connector and then CF does the work. In
this case, IIS is nothing more than an HTTP server (all bets are off when you
throw IIS into application server mode).

IIS has nothing to do with the JVM running ColdFusion. It cant even talk to
it without the help of the connector. Unless the JVM does something stupid and
corrupts the whole memory stack, this just does not happen (again, unless
you've got other problems).

As far as ColdFusion restarting, it can be configured to restart itself. IIS
isn't going to do that. Well, except perhaps if you're running BlueDragon.asp.
:) You can configure W2k3 to restart a crashed service. But that won't do
you a lot of good if the JVM dies but doesnt end its process.

Let me know how getting NetIQ to automate all this goes for ya. :)

Also, I'm not saying it is a bad idea to restart IIS. But usually, it is
unnecessary. If you're that worried about it, schedule a regular reboot time
for the system and do it then.

If it crashes in between your reboot times, fix your code so CF doesn't crash
(usually easier said than done).

[BigDMorris]

You said "As far as ColdFusion restarting, it can be configured to restart
itself."

How do you do that? About every other day, my CF MX 7 server starts queuing
tasks until it gets up into the hundreds, and I have to restart it. Is there
an easy way to have it automatically restart when it goes off into the weeds
like that?

[BKBK]

Is there an easy way to have it automatically restart when it goes off into the
weeds like that?
Assuming you're on Windows, follow the following steps

- open Services in Administrative Tools (via Control Panel)
- right-click on ColdFusion MX 7 Application Server and select Properties
- press the Recovery tab