Warning…Don’t Use the Windows Registry to Store ColdFusion Clients in Production

If you are a ColdFusion developer, you’ll know what I’m talking about. If you are not, either read this and learn about ColdFusion or wait until my next blog entry (which will be on the WWDC 2007 Conference).

Getting back to ColdFusion. In production, you should NEVER store your client variables in the registry (see image below).

Why? Simple. The more traffic you get, the more data will be written to in the registry and the potential to getting a “Registry Corrupt” goes up with every hit. Trust me. It happened to us. Many times, before we figured out that is what was causing the constant crashes.

We would rebuild our server, install everything and the site would stay up for 2 to 3 months, then we would start getting a “Registry Corrupt” error. This happened three times before the connection was made between ColdFusion client variables being written to the registry and the registry corruption error.

Thanks to Google for providing the answer we needed. The best thing to do is to create a new database (we created one in SQL Server…see image below).

I then created a datasource in the ColdFusion administrator and in the “Client Variables” screen, I mapped it to that datasource. (see image below)

The script then automatically created 2 tables call CDATA and CGLOBAL.

Within a few minutes, my CGLOBAL table had over 1000 rows. Make sure you set the purging of data accordingly so that your database does not grow too big.

Once you do that, you should clean out your registry with one of many scripts out on the Web for cleaning registry entries.

If you only remember one thing from this article, it should be this: DON’T PUT COLDFUSION IN A PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT WITH CLIENT VARIABLES SET TO BE STORE IN THE REGISTRY.

For a good article on all sorts of ColdFusion variables, but especially on the corruption issue with Client variables, check out http://cfdj.sys-con.com/read/41649.htm

Good luck!

Cheers!
Marcelo Lewin
The Digital Media Dude