After slightly longer than expected downtime, my server is happily reconnected and the DNS change is trickling through the net.

My blog and all of sumoc.com will be offline for several days starting Friday Aug 20th. I'm moving the server to a new location and it's going to be a relatively slow transition. If this is sad news to you, you should really get out more...

As previously blogged, Charlie Arehart spoke about running BlueDragon on .NET at the SDCFUG meeting last night. Charlie had a running copy of it on his laptop and showed us some pretty neat stuff. Here are a few of the many things I learned about BlueDragon for .NET:

• BlueDragon for .NET extends the .NET framework. This means that once you've installed BlueDragon on your .NET server, all your .cfm pages are processed by BlueDragon through the .NET engine.
• You can CFINCLUDE .aspx pages in .cfm pages and vice-versa. Since BlueDragon for .NET extends the .NET framework, it's all compatible and interchangeable.
• BlueDragon for .NET is essentially BlueDragon re-compiled on .NET using Jscript J#. Yes, changes had to be made to make this work correctly, and it's still pre-beta and not perfect, but it's pretty cool that virtually the same code can run on .NET and J2EE platforms.
• You can CFIMPORT .NET classes and use them in your CFML code. Charlie demonstrated this using a calendar control, but there are endless possibilities.

These are a very small percentage of the cool stuff I saw last night at the SDCFUG meeting. If I have more time I'll post more...

Note: I am not a .NET developer, so please excuse any misuse of terminology and feel free to submit corrections in the comments.

Tomorrow Charlie Arehart, CTO of New Atlanta, will be showing off the latest Blue Dragon stuff for the San Diego ColdFusion User Group. For those who've been living under a rock, the latest version of Blue Dragon allow you to run CFML on top of .NET, which is of interest to many CF fans who find themselves in Micro$oft centric IT groups.

Fortunately and/or unfortunately, Commonspot is backwards compatible to older versions of ColdFusion, including versions which required very careful use of CFLOCK to ensure shared memory doesn't become corrupted. This means that even if you are running CFMX, you're going to have alot of locks being set and cleared on your server. Occasionally, Commonspot users run into situations where these locks get deadlocked and start timing out, bogging the server down.

Usually this is due to a unique situation involving load patterns or user behavior that Paperthin QA didn't catch, but telling you that that doesn't make you feel any better does it?

Today I got an email from someone having this very problem and I thought I would share my advice to him in case it comes in handy for someone else. Here's his question and my answer:

We are noticing an extreme number of lock errors in the CommonSpot code. "Error","jrpp-2","07/27/04","11:29:11","UDS_commonspot-users","A timeout occurred while attempting to lock appcommonspot-users. The specific sequence of files included or processed is: path/to/some/template.cfm This is happening very frequently and eventually causes our jrun process to either hang or go away. Random occurrences of each.

About your problem specifically, this is what I'd do:

1. Run CFStat on the server and look to see how many threads are running. You'll start to notice a pattern where locked threads pile up and the thread count increases. Once the lock breaks the thread count will drop back down to normal.
2. Once you think you can identify the pattern in cfstat, watch for a lock and run a series of stack traces during several locking incidents. MM has a KB article about how to do this if you've never done it before.
3. Once you have a few stack traces, look them up and down for commonalities. Eventually you'll find some common, um, spot where everything's locking up. You'll be able to tell form the trace what line of what file it is getting stuck on. This is great ammo for Paperthin support and may even give you a hint as to a setting you can tweak to make the problem go away.

Paperthin just released SP2 for Commonspot 4.0.

Also, if you landed here looking for help with Commonspot, make sure you sign up for the Commonspot email list at chattyfig!