Vacation's over -- back to the grind. The latest problem I'm having with ColdFusion is 100% peg of my system resources roughly every hour for about 5 minutes. It starts occuring for no reason, then stops for no reason.

I used Filemon from www.sysinternals.com to find out what processes were running, and the following processes were being run over and over:

1:56:14 PM jrun.exe:1588 OPEN D:\webroot\CFIDE\scripts\cfform.swc SUCCESS Options: Open Access: All
1:56:14 PM jrun.exe:1588 QUERY INFORMATION D:\webroot\CFIDE\scripts\cfform.swc SUCCESS Attributes: A
1:56:14 PM jrun.exe:1588 CLOSE D:\webroot\CFIDE\scripts\cfform.swc SUCCESS
1:56:14 PM jrun.exe:1588 OPEN D:\CFusionMX7\wwwroot\WEB-INF\cfform\frameworks SUCCESS Options: Open Access: All
1:56:14 PM jrun.exe:1588 QUERY INFORMATION D:\CFusionMX7\wwwroot\WEB-INF\cfform\frameworks SUCCESS Attributes: D
1:56:14 PM jrun.exe:1588 CLOSE D:\CFusionMX7\wwwroot\WEB-INF\cfform\frameworks SUCCESS
1:56:14 PM jrun.exe:1588 OPEN D:\CFusionMX7\wwwroot\WEB-INF\cfform\frameworks\mx.swc SUCCESS Options: Open Access: All
1:56:14 PM jrun.exe:1588 QUERY INFORMATION D:\CFusionMX7\wwwroot\WEB-INF\cfform\frameworks\mx.swc SUCCESS Attributes: A
1:56:14 PM jrun.exe:1588 CLOSE D:\CFusionMX7\wwwroot\WEB-INF\cfform\frameworks\mx.swc SUCCESS
1:56:14 PM jrun.exe:1588 OPEN D:\CFusionMX7\wwwroot\WEB-INF\cfform\global.css SUCCESS Options: Open Access: All
1:56:14 PM jrun.exe:1588 QUERY INFORMATION D:\CFusionMX7\wwwroot\WEB-INF\cfform\global.css SUCCESS Attributes: A
1:56:14 PM jrun.exe:1588 CLOSE D:\CFusionMX7\wwwroot\WEB-INF\cfform\global.css SUCCESS

Apparently it has something to do with CFFORM, which I do not use in any of my development. That makes it odd that it would occur on this particular server. I have not figured out how to make this madness stop yet. If anyone has any thoughts, I'd love to hear them.

Update: 1/9/2005

It turns out the problem was a setting in the ColdFusion administrator. If you're using client variables in any way, it is very important to store client session data in a database rather than in the registry (which is default.) Client sessions should NEVER be stored in the registry. Not only can your registry grow to astronomical proportions on even a small site, but by default every 1 hour and 7 minutes ColdFusion will attempt to purge old variables. This will completely tie up the server for the duration (5 or more minutes with a big store of sessions.) Also, uncheck the option "Purge data for clients that remain unvisited for..." or set the interval to a high number. Many thanks to Stephen Dupre from Adobe for giving me the information to solve the problem.

This is one of those default settings that will disrupt a server if not changed. I wish I had remembered that one application I had used client variables.