by Bruce Morris

Can it stand up under load?

I have a tale of ColdFusion woe and have to add my 2¢ worth. Ted Brockwood's review is positive and he's a good reviewer. My review is negative. " . . . let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend."
May 31, 1999

I don’t usually write highly critical reviews. Basically if I don’t like a product I don’t mess with it much and don’t bother to write about it. But I have to take issue with the article Ted Brockwood wrote about ColdFusion. I have been involved with a major site development over the last 8 months using ColdFusion and have to report we have been less than pleased with the product. I hear similar complaints from other developers I talk with: frequent core dumps, mysterious semaphore errors, and gory crashes. Most sites seem to be happy if all it does is the normal six or seven daily core dumps and nothing worse.

Please be aware we have complete faith in Ted and his experience. He just had a different experience with the product than I did. I would also like to point out that Allaire makes the absolutely brilliant Homesite, which I love. My complaint is only with the ColdFusion product.

The product is certainly a great idea and seems to work OK for simple things. But if you try to do anything other than fairly simple pages or use any of the newer features, problems may ensue. A quick check on their Web site discussion forums (they don’t seem to cull these much) shows the problems seem common and are not just with the Solaris version but NT as well. There is a surprising amount of messages there from people with serious-sounding problems. The last time I looked there were plenty of people in the forums asking about the semaphore error messages. I saw no useful answers to that problem.

I lead a team of 20 Web technical developers and we have put an enormous amount of time in trying to get ColdFusion to work cleanly. Believe me we’ve tried hard and had contact with Allaire about our problems.

I am based in the UK and found Allaire’s tech support here to very poor. They have contracted their UK support to Unipalm Plc whose ColdFusion experts seem to be people reading from manuals if you manage to get through to them at all. We are not supposed to use US support since we are in the UK. We get emails from Unipalm closing open issues for lack of activity months after we gave up waiting for a response from them. The most junior programmer in our office seems to know vastly more about ColdFusion than any of the people from Unipalm we have had contact with. Some of their support people we spoke with had never heard of the product. We complained to Allaire in the US very loudly on a CEO level about our problems and managed to get some of their engineers on the phone who were quite cagey but not handy with solutions. They seemed afraid to say whether anything worked or did not work.

We found it best to begin each communication with Allaire like this: "before you start, please be aware we have installed the latest version, all the latest patches to your product and all other software we are using is the latest version with all the right patches, etc., etc., etc." We never did hear what they thought of the rather large error logs they asked us to send for analysis. During almost all our calls to them they suggested we switch from their UNIX version to their NT version. We tried using it on an NT system to see if it was any better but with no success.

We developed three sites with ColdFusion and are moving them away from it as quickly as we can. We managed to shift most of the heavy lifting into the database side of things and are using server-side Java for everything else. We have moved one of the sites off ColdFusion and the others will be following. We have huge, under utilized servers with RAM measured in gigabytes so it’s not a hardware problem.

I had a call Friday and again this morning from another London-based company in pre-launch mode who were having the same nightmares we have (constant core dumps, crashes and semaphore errors). This does not seem to be an isolated problem. While trying to find an answer to the problem I spoke with other developers using the product and I found no one willing to say "The ColdFusion Server, like the Studio, is a very solid product" as Ted says in his article. I couldn’t even get anyone at Allaire to say that.

It is quite difficult to review a product like ColdFusion without actually testing it in a real commercial setting. On the surface all appears fine. I myself chose to use the product based on my competitive evaluations and due diligence. As with many of these complicated products you cannot really know if it is going to be OK until you actually try to use it in a real production environment. Then you find out about the hidden incompatibilities and weird system problems. In my opinion, much of the cool new Internet software out there right now is shoddy and bug-ridden. The push to get to market with the new features before someone else does is so strong the actual customer use of these hurried products becomes a side issue.

Here are a couple of things we found that might help if you’re having problems like I’m describing:

- Basically you can live with the core dumps. It recovers fairly quickly and you can probably live with them until you have a chance to move to a more reliable solution.

- The semaphore errors are another thing. We made most of them go away by setting CF to log session information as cookies rather than as a text file. The text file grew huge quickly and corrupted whenever there was a crash. In spite of dire warnings from Allaire, we also changed simultaneous connections to 5 times the recommended level. This sped up database access noticeably.

- We could not get the supplied restart script to work and I hear this problem from others. You need to write your own. CF leaves processes running when it crashes that the script they supply cannot seem to shut down.

- Move fancy stuff to the database and do some server side Java stuff. Move away from using ColdFusion to do anything complicated. We are doing more with PLSQL and server-side applets.

I hate to say bad things about a product. I realize that market conditions today mean companies must consider losing competitive advantage if they take too long to get a product to market. But I lost more than just sleep over this one.

At the Web Developer’s Journal we truly believe we should " . . . . let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend." We have lots of reviews that don’t jive perfectly with our own experience and personal feelings. I usually say nothing – let the readers make their own judgement. But this product caused me enormous financial, social and mental losses and I could not let the well-written, positive review go by without letting people know there is another opinion. We have struggled with the product for 8 months and had plenty of opportunity to talk to other developers working with the product. I feel our experience is not an isolated one. ColdFusion is not a product I would recommend.

But you should also check out Ted's positive review.

Check out the WDJ ColdFusion discussion group to hear what others have to say and add your own 2¢ worth.