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.

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/client/index.cfm/2009/8/10/cf8_migration_resources

Thanks for offering and allowing the updates, Jim.

“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.cfm/do/blog.entry/entry/Java_6_and_ColdFusion_8).”

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/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=3&threadid=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.

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.

http://www.webtrenches.com/post.cfm/upgrading-to-cf8-tips