As some of you know, my webserver runs coldfusion which keeps the business site ticking over nicely. Well, normally it does, but just recently it seems to be playing up and the only way I discover this is when the web pages no longer work.
Today was another bad day for the Coldfusion server. I was speaking to one customer who was clearly looking at things on the web site. Five minutes later a customer phones in who has been on one page of the site but can’t get to the price page.
I was still able to log in to the server and it appeared to be very lightly loaded. Restarted Apache but that made no difference, not one web page on the site seemed to work, whether it was a Colfusion page or a simple static web page. Fortunately when things get this bad I’m able to phone the data centre (rackspace – who are there 24 hours a day to help fix these sort of problems) and get some help. James to the rescue, it appeared that Coldfusion had taken up all the ‘handles’. Once coldfusion was restarted, everything else was fine.
He also commented that it shouldn’t be taking as long as it does to restart (about 5 minutes on our server) so there must be something else not quite right. In the mean time I think I’ll restart it every other day in the hope that 5 minutes down time when I know its happening is better than perhaps a day of downtime when I’m not able to know about it or fix it.