Andrew's ramblings

ColdFusion Builder and huge memory leaks

Tags: Coldfusion

Since buying my new computer the one thing I hear the most now is the disk access, and with ColdFusion builder I here a constant access when it comes to my Hard Drives.

Why is that?

under normal circumstances a computer will swap out what it has in memory if the memory needs to be swapped. Systems with low memory will notice huge performance gains when increasing memory alone.

So why is it that on a system that is an I7 930 turbo boost, and 12gigs of memory do I notice a hell of a lot of disk access, when running ColdFusion Builder?

I don't really know the answer to this one, but I went looking for answers anyway.

I have 2 Eclipse installs one is 64bit with CFEclipse and the other is 32 bit running ColdFusion Builder. Which one do you think would be the one that uses the most memory?

If you said ColdFusion Builder you would be right, but maybe not because of the reasons you might think. ColdFusion Builder has a memory footprint when first loaded as a plugin of around 70-80mb's, and has a total of around 130mb in useable heap space. This will depend on your eclipse.in settings but for this demonstration I have left them at the default.

The one thing that did surprise me when first booting up was the amount of memory that was used, and heap max. Now one could argue that ColdFusion does a lot more than CFEclsipe, or that 64bit would actually use more than a 32bit application.

But the number one thing that surprised me the most, was when I first ran both applications I opened the exact same file, and this is where the surprises really came about.

Lets first look at CFEclsipe and the file that I used for this test, was the Alagad image.cfc component unencrypted. When I first started Eclipse with CFeclipse my heap size was 20M/40M that is about normal when ever I have used this plugin, but this might also differ to your findings depending on what other plugins you may have installed.

But lets load the file with CFEclsipe. Watching the heap status I saw it jump to 35mb before settling back at 23mb, that isn't too bad at all. So lets scroll this file to the bottom of the file, my heap size went to 26m/42m not to bad I guess.

So lets do the same test in ColdFusion Builder.

When I first ran ColdFusion Builder I started at 40mb/80mb and I would consider this normal, but what I did not expect was that the memory then shot up to 60mb/82mb before settling at 53mb/82mb.

The very first thing that I noticed that was different, was that I not only shot up to as much as 120mb/165mb. But I also observed the fact that it tried to rebuild the workspace on about 15 occasions, now the memory alone didn't shock me as the fact it actually tried to rebuild the workspace a number of times after it had loaded. But the one thing with the memory was that it jumped up/down so fast that it was like doing a garbage collection very rapidly.

This was one thing I did not notice with CFeclipse, as it jumped up and stayed there.

But for the ultimate memory leak in ColdFusion Builder try this little test in both CFEclsipe and ColdFusion Builder. With both files opened, continually scroll up and down in the editor.

CFEclsipe is lucky to move in about 2-5mb steps settllign each and every time back where it started within 1-2mb which in my tests above didn't go above 25mb, ColdFusion Builder on the other hand with the exact same file showed a seriously different story. It jumped up and down to the tune as much as over 100mb in memory.

That's right and if you timed it right it stayed there for hours to boot. Where as CFeclipse always settled back to around 23mb.

So the question is what the hell is ColdFusion Builder doing to waste so much memory so quickly?

I guess only Adobe will know.