Looking For ColdFusion 8 Migration Stories
Thursday 31 January 2008 - Filed under Code
At work we are still running ColdFusion 7. We are looking at moving to 8 this year and are in the pre-planning stages…
I’d love to hear from anyone who has already migrated! We are running ColdFusion 7 on top of IIS (Win2003) so we are looking at migrating the ColdFusion server settings (datasource, mappings, sandbox setting, etc) + all the IIS stuff from one server to another. We have a test environment setup in which we can experiment but I’d love to hear from anyone with real world experience.
- What issues did you run into (if any)?
- What tools did you use to make the migration easier?
- What’s better since you migrated? What’s worse (if anything)?
- What would you differently if you could do it again?
Update: Charlie Arehart has a nice post concerning migration resources on his blog.
2008-01-31 » Jim Priest
31 January 2008 @ 7:01 pm
Here are some tips I posted a while back that answer some of your questions…
http://www.webtrenches.com/pos.....o-cf8-tips
31 January 2008 @ 10:28 pm
I have never migrated from 7 to 8. However, my hosting company, hostMySite did, on all their servers. I have four sites that never missed a beat and I am now develping on 7 and uploading module to 8 with no issues. I think it is a pretty painless upgrade.
1 February 2008 @ 9:46 am
Unlike the mostly positive upgrade narratives I’ve heard so far, our CF7 to CF8 migration experience has been negative. Our infrastructure and requirements for CF are a little different to the norm: we run a JRun J2EE setup of CF Enterprise, use CFCs extensively for all key applications, and use Apache as CF’s webserver.
The actual migration process wasn’t too difficult and comprised a day’s work, mainly comprising copying of settings between XML files. Our issue is that the result of the migration process has not been as expected.
* What issues did you run into (if any)?
Few during the migration itself.
* What tools did you use to make the migration easier?
CVS and Eclipse’s text comparison tools.
* What’s better since you migrated? What’s worse (if anything)?
What’s worse? Application performance under CF8 is 6-8 times slower within our CFC-heavy apps than under CF7 (which was slow in itself.) What’s better? New functionality – image and document handling.
CF8 performance on our CFC-driven apps is too slow to permit us to move CF8 onto our production environment. We will continue to use CF7 on our live environment until we’ve isolated the CF8 performance issues. There’s a thread on Adobe’s forums about the CF8 performance issue. So far we’ve tried the forum’s proposed fixes without success.
I’m interested in hearing anyone else’s experiences if they’ve suffered similar issues, since we seem to be among a minority of CF8 users who’ve had performance problems with it.
6 February 2008 @ 4:49 am
We upgraded the same (CF Standard) server rather than migrated to a different machine, but these comments might be useful anyway as we’re on IIS/w2k3. The process wasn’t completely smooth, but I think it will depend on your specific configuration and how you go about upgrading. CF8 is significantly superior to CF7 so well worth it regardless.
Installation issues:
* The installer’s migration wizard HTML pages were a bit flaky: auto refreshes to the next step didn’t happen – may be to do with our strict Windows permissions.
* MySQL data sources didn’t migrate – because previously using manual JDBC drivers I expect. CF8 has native mySQL 4/5 support which we used to recreate the sources.
* Verity collections didn’t migrate – perhaps because in a custom location.
All other settings migrated ok.
Post-install issues:
* NT Performance Monitor no longer works: apparently this is an issue only when you uninstall your previous CF7 AFTER installing CF8 (even though that’s the recommended procedure), see:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/w.....id=1303184
* Also when I uninstalled CF7 it removed both the CFIDE and the default document settings in IIS which were being used in the new CF8 installation. It may be best to just leave CF7 installed and just disable the services. Or uninstall 7 first… depends on how much work re-configuring from scratch would be (in our case, not that much, so I think I would do that next time).
We haven’t had the performance issues mentioned by Ed: quite the contrary. However there is a known issue with Java 1.6 which slows up the loading of class files, so app initialisation can take much longer. But once up and running everything seems to be faster.
Good luck with it and let us know how you get on.
Julian.
6 February 2008 @ 8:06 am
Thanks for the comments everyone! Does anyone have any experience with sandbox security? That was the one thing I didn’t see in the CAR export options (unless I overlooked something)…
29 February 2008 @ 3:52 pm
Just went from 6.1 to 8 on a production server by completely replacing the servers. Copied the code, setup ODBCs and up and running it went. No issues.
12 August 2009 @ 1:34 pm
Charlie Arehart emailed me an update to this thread:
“He complained about the slow performance on the upgrade, but no one replied to him (or updated it since then) that this was likely due to the jvm bug, and what the fix is (upgrade to jvm 1.6_10, as many have blogged such as http://corfield.org/blog/index.....Fusion_8).“
14 August 2009 @ 11:54 am
It may help to give some more context to Jim’s last comment. :-) He notes that I emailed him with an update of a question asked in the comments here. That was because the comments were closed some time after the prior comments in 2008. Others may have since wanted to offer thoughts to address such questions but could not, and I pointed out in the email, so he’s kindly re-opened comments on this entry.
The “he” I referred to is “Ed” above, who had said, “CF8 performance on our CFC-driven apps is too slow to permit us to move CF8 onto our production environment. ” It wasn’t clear what forum post he was referring to, so we couldn’t know if it had discussed things like the JVM bug and how the update helps. Then again, at that time (in feb 2008), the 1.6 jvm bug had not been fixed.
Hope the info was helpful.
And Jim also added an update to the bottom of the entry above with a link to a blog entry I’d done with links to still more CF8 migration resources (and why they still matter as we move to CF9). For those only getting the comment notifications, it’s
ColdFusion 8 migration resources (from 6, 7, or even earlier)
http://www.carehart.org/blog/c....._resources
Thanks for offering and allowing the updates, Jim.
17 August 2009 @ 5:58 am
Hi,
I’m the Ed from the original post. Thanks for the updates. The original post I referred to was (IIRC) an Adobe CF forum post about application performance after the CF7 > CF8 migration. I don’t recall there being info about a JVM bug in 1.6 at the time, although we did read later Sean C’s post about the classloader problem. Most of our apps used a custom CFC-driven ORM framework written for CF7 that became unusably slow under an out-of-the-box CF8 / Java 1.6 installation.
As a result of the slow loading issue (in addition to several long-standing platform stability issues with CF on our servers dating back to early Macromedia days), our organisation moved away from CF for future development. The legacy apps remain on CF7. It’s unfortunate that, in our case, CF was blamed for what was really a Sun/Java issue in this case.