tracker issue : CF-3783361

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Title:

Please improve the web server configuration tool, to deal with common Adobe-recommended tuning tweaks

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Status/Resolution/Reason: Closed/Won't Fix/

Reporter/Name(from Bugbase): Charlie Arehart / Charlie Arehart (Charlie Arehart)

Created: 06/30/2014

Components: Installation/Config, Connector

Versions: 11.0

Failure Type: Enhancement Request

Found In Build/Fixed In Build: CF11_Final /

Priority/Frequency: Trivial / Unknown

Locale/System: English / Win 2008 Server

Vote Count: 20

Could you PLEASE improve the web server configuration tool, in a number of simple ways, to deal with common Adobe-recommended tuning tweaks? I would propose it change in the following ways (priority indicated):

- (very high) change it to warn if re-running the tool would lose values tweaked by users (as per the Adobe blog entries recommending such tweaks)
- (high) change it to create better defaults (since the most recent Adobe blog entry proposes new entries and higher values (as compared to the defaults) in all uses cases discussed
- (medium) change it to prompt the user with scenarios to help them decide how to configure the settings based on the scenarios documented in the Adobe blog entries
- (very high) change it to detect if a user running it on Windows has not "run as administrator" (just like the CF10 "mandatory update" tool did such a check)
- (related) related to all this is a need for CF to better help us understand the underlying metrics related to the connector (and the pools discussed in the Adobe blog entries). I will open a separate ticket requesting that CF or the connector expose such metrics

All this stems from two Adobe adobe blog entries discussing how we can and should tweak the web server connector in CF10 (blogs.coldfusion.com/post.cfm/tuning-coldfusion-10-iis-connector-configuration) and 11 (http://blogs.coldfusion.com/post.cfm/coldfusion-11-iis-connector-tuning)

For further elaboration on my suggestions above, please see two lengthy comments to the CF11 blog entry:

http://blogs.coldfusion.com/post.cfm/coldfusion-11-iis-connector-tuning#comment-FD990C60-0FE0-3F48-3DF2652D5BBA49FB

and 

http://blogs.coldfusion.com/post.cfm/coldfusion-11-iis-connector-tuning#comment-FFDC5FAD-AEA5-C34C-6D7569209437FFAF

There are many, many people suffering with problems that are related to the inappropriateness of the current default values, and while some will find the blog entries, many won't (or may not understand how to tweak things for their needs).  Since this is proving to be such an important problem, CF can and should do a better job of helping with this, both in the connector's initial configuration and with tools to provide analysis and recommendations over time.

----------------------------- Additional Watson Details -----------------------------

Watson Bug ID:	3783361

External Customer Info:
External Company:  
External Customer Name: carehart
External Customer Email:  
External Test Config: The issue applies to CF10 and 11, regardless of platform and whether one is using IIS or Apache

Attachments:

Comments:

While this feature request form requires us to pick a version and affected platform, the issue applies to CF10 and 11, regardless of whether one is using IIS or Apache.
Comment by External U.
11779 | June 30, 2014 09:55:02 AM GMT
I completely agree with Charlie here. Since we are running the configuration tool after every patch (99% of the time), it would good for your customers to know the impact if will have afterward. Also, tuning the default settings during installation might be a good idea as well so the server it's being installed on has a great chance of good performance right out of the box.
Vote by External U.
11784 | June 30, 2014 10:23:34 AM GMT
If the aim of the CF team is to simplify the lives of developers and admins, this functionality would be a most helpful and welcomed addition.
Vote by External U.
11785 | July 07, 2014 04:38:47 PM GMT
Monitoring and tweaking these settings is an integral part of running CF (as indicated by all the problems people are having when they don't know that the settings 1) exist, and 2) need to be tuned.
Vote by External U.
11786 | July 21, 2014 01:01:29 PM GMT
Totally agree. ColdFusion is not production ready without effective tools for allocation of resource. That it is only documented in some forum posts is inexcusable. The tool for configuring websites needs to make it understandable and easy to configure resource for those websites. If you want impact - imagine a large call management application built in ColdFusion, and having to send staff home while tech support figures out why ColdFusion is no longer serving up pages!
Vote by External U.
11787 | October 14, 2014 04:09:40 PM GMT
+1. It somewhat defies belief that Adobe recommends these changes but then doesn't actually roll them into the product!
Vote by External U.
11788 | October 15, 2014 12:41:21 AM GMT
+1 for all suggestions in the description. Also related: CF-3429152 and CF-3350403.
Vote by External U.
11789 | October 15, 2014 03:42:35 AM GMT
+1 This should be a high priority.
Vote by External U.
11790 | October 15, 2014 10:07:52 AM GMT
Sounds like a nice improvement to me. That tool has always been way too "dumb".
Vote by External U.
11791 | October 15, 2014 01:36:41 PM GMT
I'm voting on this because the only way Adobe will touch ticket is by popular demand, (http://blogs.coldfusion.com/post.cfm/how-we-solved-a-connector-issue-after-coldfusion-11-update-1#comment-7F17653C-F27C-B12A-F2037B083061256A) so please vote this up. It seems that it's up to a very few to get Adobes attention to fix something that will benefit the majority of all CF customers!
Vote by External U.
11792 | October 17, 2014 02:34:40 AM GMT
seems like several no-brainer changes to me
Vote by External U.
11793 | October 20, 2014 09:57:20 AM GMT
Great idea Charlie. 2 thumbs up on this one.
Vote by External U.
11794 | October 20, 2014 06:02:16 PM GMT
+1 This is critical to have as part of standard installation procedure
Vote by External U.
11795 | December 01, 2014 12:37:22 PM GMT
+1 This is an on going issue we face, seems like needed change to me.
Comment by External U.
11780 | January 06, 2015 10:19:44 AM GMT
Very important so that updates do not result in sites not working.
Vote by External U.
11796 | January 09, 2015 01:10:26 AM GMT
What are you guys waiting on?... Grow a pair and elevate this post to a VP or some with authority to make the pain go away. Get off the fence and make something happen! I just went thru 60 days of HELL, seeing my cold fusion site get progressively unstable every day. Our clients have billing over $1billion that is managed on our COLDFUSION application. I had window engineers, security professionals, COLDFUSION consultants and a cast of executives and tech support spending countless hours trying to diagnose the "cause" of this unstable environment. Imagine going work and logging into your COLDFUSION application each day to perform your job. Then activities you do every day, hour after hour are suddenly blocked. Either your browser stops responding or you get a Jakarta error saving the service is Temporarily unavailable. This is a critical issue and you need to FIX it. Thank goodness I found someone who found this thread which directed to a fix. Watching...................
Vote by External U.
11797 | January 13, 2015 08:27:47 PM GMT
The blog post (link below) says (in the comments, by Anit) to vote on this in order to convince CF to fix, so here is my vote and thanks for getting this rolling Charlie. http://blogs.coldfusion.com/post.cfm/how-we-solved-a-connector-issue-after-coldfusion-11-update-1#comment-7F17653C-F27C-B12A-F2037B083061256A
Vote by External U.
11798 | February 01, 2015 11:17:13 PM GMT
This is a fantastic idea. Issues with the web server connector are very opaque and it would be a very welcome feature to the program to have these issues eliminated, or at least, better informational awareness delivered by the tool.
Vote by External U.
11799 | February 18, 2015 10:15:52 AM GMT
Just spent hours trying to debug the initial setup using this tool on ColdFusion 11. In ColdFusion 9, I was able to select which instance goes with which site and apply the settings. Not so with the CF11 wsconfig, I kept getting 503 for all but main site and finally was able to get into the configuration files and modify them by try and error. What a waste of time. Why doesn't the wsconfig show me in GUI which instance I want to configure? And I totally agree, the tool needs to allow up to reconfigure. It's even hard to know what re-configure means when applying updates, the instructions say "reconfigure using the tool" they should instead tell us HOW to use the tool to reconfigure (i.e. remove all connectors, add them back, add back any custom changes, etc.). Please consider this a priority bug and get it fixed asap. Thanks
Vote by External U.
11800 | March 26, 2015 10:41:39 AM GMT
The issues I described in the Vote area are under Windows Server 2012 R2 and IIS 8.5
Comment by External U.
11781 | March 26, 2015 10:45:38 AM GMT
This is a very necessary improvement. Thanks.
Vote by External U.
11801 | April 29, 2015 12:32:33 PM GMT
Shed some light on the inner workings of ColdFusion
Vote by External U.
11802 | June 03, 2015 07:52:14 AM GMT
Charlie, some of the issues you mentioned are already fixed as part of some other bugs and some of them can;t be fixed. I will go point by point: 1. wsconfig has a backup feature which allows one to take backup of the configurations while unconfiguring the connector. So user will never loose his tweaked configurations. 2. There is an issue with the default values provided by wsconfig which has been fixed as part of CF12. It will provided proper defaults for connection_pool_size, connection_pool_timeout and max_reuse_connections. 3. wsconfig cannot have that kind of logic. it is just meant to configure webserver for coldusion with the values provided by user. ColdFusion provides other tools and blogs for figuring out correct values for your server based on your applications and scenarios. 4. wsconfig already prompts for "run as administrator". 5. As you mentioned, a separate bug exists for connector metrics.
Comment by Chinoy G.
11782 | October 21, 2015 04:04:02 AM GMT
Hi, Chinoy. First, thanks for the replies. (A bit sad really that it took 16 months for anyone from Adobe to reply, especially with all the supportive votes and comments on the right, but anything is better than nothing.) That said, while I do know that a later update added the backup feature (in your point 1), and again that's better than nothing, it doesn't restore them (and people may not realize that), and doesn't really warn them that they will lose the changes if they don't manually restore them. As for your point 2, that is great news that 12 will have better defaults. (One could wonder if on new installs of CF 11 or 10 it could as well, but I realize that making a change like that to the existing release has its pros and cons.) As for your point 3, well, you say it "cannot" but that's not true. It certainly could, and I think it should, especially considering all the machinations and deliberations that the blog post has folks go through to determine suitable values. As for point 4, I have to vehemently disagree. It does NOT "already prompt one to run as Admin". No sir. It does not, and never has. And this is of course a vital problem, because people who don't know that they should do that often are left thinking they "did the job" of reconfiguring the connector when they did not do it completely or successfully (if it's not "run as admin"). And lest you miss my point, I was saying in the original bug report that the "mandatory update" installer (for CF10) HAD in fact been written in such a way that if it's NOT run with "run as admin", it stops the user and warns them that they must close it and do that. I was asking that the wsconfig tool be modified to do the same. It seems trivial, since it's been done for the mandatory installer. Please respond to this, as it's a very pressing matter. Finally, as for your point 5, yep, separate bug reports exist. And I will add, for the sake of readers, that Adobe had since done a blog post pointing out a new "status worker" feature of the Tomcat connector that could help CF admins better understand some of the connection pool processing for the connector. For more, see my blog post: http://www.carehart.org/blog/client/index.cfm/2015/8/3/more_on_tomcat_status_worker
Comment by External U.
11783 | November 25, 2015 09:19:07 AM GMT