Jul 12
Those of you that have played with Windows 2003 load balancing will already know it’s pretty good at doing what it says on the tin ‘Load Balancing’. It’s super simple to setup two boxes in a web farm and then load balance port(s) between the two nodes for no additional cost other than server hardware and OS. Having just graduated to dealing with large(ish) scale ColdFusion Enterprise environments there’s a couple of gotcha’s I’ve stumbled across and thought I’d share them with you. These ideas also apply to single server installs of CF too minus the load balancing stuff of course.
July 12th, 2005 at 1:01 pm
Just to add a quick note: AFAIK servers alive is not ready for Win2003 Servers.
July 12th, 2005 at 2:36 pm
it’s monitoring this server just fine
July 12th, 2005 at 3:06 pm
I use ServersAlive for monitoring CF sites, and found that a simple "am I alive" CF probe isn’t always enough- database failure may cause more problems than Jrun/CF or IIS. You can use your probe to watch the database with something simple like this:
<cftry>
<cfquery datasource="myDSN" name="probe">
select 1
</cfquery>
TRUE
<cfcatch>
FALSE
</cfcatch>
</cftry>
This will check IIS, CF and datasource availability in a single request.
July 12th, 2005 at 3:28 pm
that’s a very good point, I had a TCP Ping to my sql server on port 1433 going but i forgot I could use CF to do the same thing! Thanks Pete!
July 15th, 2005 at 5:59 pm
for "Alex Hubner", could you elaborate on what part Servers ALive is not ready for Windows 2003?
(you can also mail me directly - I’m the author of Servers Alive :-))
September 14th, 2006 at 2:52 pm
I’m still in the planning stages for a load-balanced, Cold Fusion web site. I was wondering why not use the ‘JRun clustering’ feature built into MX6.1 to handle Cold Fusion service interruptions?
I apologize in advance if I’m missing something obvious; again I’m new at this.
Thanks.