Have you noticed requests stop processing and your CPU usage is high?
There are many possible causes of this – a common one being using “Registry” as the CLIENT variable backing store.
Have you seen this combined with “java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space” errors in your logs?
Again, there are several causes for filling the PermGen space but one common one is too many templates for the allotted space. The PermGen space stores information about classes. Behind the scenes of ColdFusion each CFM translates to a Java class. This means that if you have many templates used by your server, you’ll have lots of classes and use a lot of PermGen space. Remember this class information gets stored in the PermGen for the life of the server and is never unloaded!
Careful not to get confused with the CF administrator setting “Maximum number of cached templates” which are cached in the Heap space.
So, how many is too many?
Well, I looked at an example with a very simple set of CFMs. I took 10,000 CFM templates containing the single line:
<cfset x = now() />
The mean average PermGen increase per template (after execution of course) was 2,677 bytes. This probably doesn’t sound like a lot but put this into practice on a live server with a real application and it only takes ~1,000-2,000 templates before you’re out of PermGen space and an unstable server.
Note: It’s not just CFMs that are Java classes behind the scenes, your CFC functions count too!