ColdFusion has never been very good at allowing you to see inside your server and work out what its actually doing at any point in time. One way to get a nice overview is to use ColdFusion’s command line tool cfstat. With ColdFusion 8 out now with its server performance monitor, cfstat is likely redundant for enterprise customers, but if you aren’t there or dont have access to it, this could still be useful to you. Its been a while since I used it so I thought I would put down some notes on what it does and some handy tips for using it.
First of all its located at {cfroot}\bin\cfstat.bat I have been running it on CF7 to help diagnose a persistent crashing problem we have been having on one server. This meant I wanted to log things to a file so I created a bat file to save some typing.
This set cfstat to output its current stats every second to a file in c:\temp\ The output has a number of columns, I have included the most interesting below:
- Req Q’ed: Number of CF requests currently in our queue waiting to run.
- Req Run’g: Number of CF requests currently being actively worked on by CF.
- Req TO’ed: Total number of CF requests that have timed out.
- AvgQ Time: A running average of the time requests are spending waiting in our queue to run.
- AvgReq Time: A running average of the time we actually spend processing a request (includes queued time.)
- AvgDB Time: A running average of the time we spend doing database related processing in any CF requests.
If you know what”Maximum number of simultaneous requests” is set to in your CF Admin, then you can easily see a general state of your server. Its up to you to look at the stats as they come out of the server but I find that it can tell you exactly how busy your server is at any time (Requests Running + Queued) and over time the queue tells you about your consistent load. You can read more about cfstat on LiveDocs.
