Patch the box and upgrade CF8 JRE for stability
When I signed up for a VPS pre-installed with CF8 Enterprise I made the assumption it would be patched for me. Hmph. After a month and a bit of tolerating instability I finally nailed the problem.
The Symptoms
The server would randomly stop serving CF pages at all times of the day, noted by my monitoring service Websitepulse For $20 per month the service will independently check my server every 15 minutes from 3 cities around the world (I chose London, Melbourne and New York).Another issue was that pages took a long time to be served at the best of times, especially after reboot and the server would rarely start CF in the amount of time dedicated to startup.
After discovering the server going down, I turned up CF monitoring alerts to send me reports when the server was reaching the end of it's resources. Nothing spooky there either. Still crashing.
The Solution
Another failure yesterday and some time on my hands I took a look the server to see which hotfixes had been applied etc when I realized this box hadn't been touched since I signed up for it. I found the latest hot fix and plugged that in and restarted. Still took an age to get the box to restart.I Googled the slow start-up and found Sean Corfield's excellent post from January about CF8 and the JRE that ships with the server and saw the update that newer versions of the JRE fix the issue of slow start-up. I installed the 1.6.16 upgrade and Bob's yer Uncle! Faster restart times, stability and, woah daddy, 0.096s average time to last byte from Website pulse monitoring, down by nearly 10x!