The Byte Stops Here

JVM Tuning has been long a favorite subject of mine. Maybe some day I'll share our JVM Settings in full, but for now you need to do two things.

Update to JDK 1.6 Update 10 - Once CF8 came out, people started complaining that their frameworks loaded slowly, initial page loads were long, that CFC generation took a while, etc. The conventional wisdom was to move back down to 1.5, which didn't have these issues. No more. Update 10, which has long been in beta, is now fully launched, and our CFC generation, slow loading issues are nearly gone. Whereas before it would take minutes, it now takes less than 15 seconds. Besides the other benefits of running the latest 1.6, this one rocks. Download info available @ http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp.

Garbage Collection Settings just for Frameworks - We would occasionally notice hiccups, slight slow downs for GC despite our numerous JVM tweaks. No more since adding two lines. More information is available @ Mike Brunt's blog - http://www.cfwhisperer.com/post.cfm/sun-jvm-1-6-heap-memory-behavior-with-coldfusion-frameworks.

The Two JVM Tweaks:
-Dsun.rmi.dgc.client.gcInterval=600000 -Dsun.rmi.dgc.server.gcInterval=600000

Subversion 1.5.3 had enough bugs to warrant a new release two weeks later. See notice below.

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I'm happy to announce Subversion 1.5.4, fast on the heels of Subversion 1.5.3.

1.5.3 was discovered to contain a regression in 'svn merge'; see CHANGES for more information.

Subversion 1.5.4 is available from:

http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.5.4.tar.bz2

http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.5.4.tar.gz

http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.5.4.zip

http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-deps-1.5.4.tar.bz2

http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-deps-1.5.4.tar.gz

http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-deps-1.5.4.zip

Release notes for the 1.5.x release series may be found at:

http://subversion.tigris.org/svn_1.5_releasenotes.html

You can find the list of changes between 1.5.4 and earlier versions at:

http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/tags/1.5.4/CHANGES

The PCI Security Standards Council has released a new version of the Data Security Standards today; namely version 1.2.

To download the doc and a list of changes:

• PCI DSS Version 1.2
  
• PCI DSS Summary of Changes (Between 1.1 and 1.2)
  

I don't know how many of you guys remember Reactor? All the buzz has been around Transfer for the past couple years. We've been using Reactor since 2006 in production with little to no issues.

Now that Doug Hughes posted that he has handing management of the Reactor Framework to Mark Drew, its great news. Read more @ Doug's Blog.

I do have a couple gripes about Reactor though, which I've expressed to numerous people, including Doug since 2006, and I wanted to make them public here.

One is that Reactor doesn't support schema's out of the box for MS SQL 2005. I can't speak for other DBs. If every table in your DB is owned by DBO, i.e. DBO.tableName, then you are fine. But if you are like us, and have multiple Schemas, then you have to hack Reactor. What's worse, the hack is SOOOO simple. Reactor goes through and figures out your DB anyway, and it can figure out the Schema and add it to its call, but it doesn't. Simple right? But we've been running the hacked version for years because Doug thinks "Reactor is stable" so he decided not to change it to add this functionality.

More details @ http://www.reactorframework.com/ticket/42.

The other issue is Reactor creating CF UUIDs when it should be creating MSSQL GUIDs.

My one enhancement for Reactor would be suggesting caching for queries. When Reactor was released, we were still in the CF7 world. But now that queries with cfqueryparam's can be cached, it makes sense to add that.

Excited to see some movement with the framework, and look forward to seeing what's next.

Look what I found! The Small Business Administration posted a 126 page doc on their CF standards! Download it while you still can!

• SBA ColdFusion Programming Standards

Enjoy!