Any question answered...

It's not our code (well, it kind of is, some legacy stuff written by another company before I worked there) and it's killing our linux servers daily. We shouldn't be looking at it but the guys who actually host and cough "maintain" it have no idea. I fixed their last redirect loop problem that was generating a shit tonne of 'traffic' and it was the first time I'd seen the poxy code.

Anyway, just wondering if there are any tools I can use for debugging CF or any tweaks that might buy us some resources on the server. I'm sure it's some kind of loop that one of the pages is getting into. The load on the servers increases until they fall over (how shit is it that it just kills the whole CF process? At least IIS has a separate worker process for each site) and yet there's no increase in traffic hitting the server from the load balancer. That's why I assume it's a problem with the code and some infinite loop rather than an external DOS or something.

I've analysed the apache logs and can't see anything out of the ordinary but does CF has its own log or anything that might assist me narrow down the hunt? There's multiple sites on these boxes and when it falls over it takes them all down.

I'm a total noob when it comes to apache hosted stuff and CF hence me asking. I just want to fix it so I look like a hero again.. contract renewal coming up ;)

It's generally a fucking horrible language and the developers who create these monstrosities are often long gone by the time you get to look at it. Has it always had this problem, or has it just started manifesting after something else has changed on the server? If it's the latter then it could be an incompatibility of some kind.

Seem to vaguely recall some of our sites having a similar problem which was nailed down to Verity (CF search engine) freaking out over something, so we started slowly upgrading to CF9 and Solr instead, but your problem could be anything, really.

For debugging we use Coldfire which should hopefully let you see where things are starting to go wrong during execution: http://coldfire.riaforge.org/