Thoughts from the mountains

I wanted to post an update to my post a few days ago about slow mail sending performance from my ColdFusion 9 server. To summarize my previous post, I was seeing much slower performance from my Cold Fusion 9 server when sending ".mail" files from the mail spool to my smto server. In the past, I had ColdFusion7 installed on the same box with Exchange 2003 and sent my bulk emails directly to the local mailserver. When I moved to a new server recently with ColdFusion 9, I started to send the mail to the old exchange server on the same network. The amount of time it took to send all of the messages from the spool to the email server dramatically increased. I switched my setup to include a local smtp server on the same box and used that smtp server to relay the mail to the exchange server and the speed dramatically increased and it now seem to be as fast as my old setup with the local smtp server.

I have updated my Mango blog theme to version 1.3 this evening after adding pod support. This adds the ability to easily change the content available in the right side column and the footer. If you would like to try out the theme or update an older version, head on over to my project page to download the new version.

We recently moved our site at work from CF7 to CF9 and I'm noticing a strange behavior when sending out bulk emails. If I send 500 emails at once they all quickly end up in the spool, but then they are actually leaving the spool for the mail server one at a time every one or two seconds. This is much different behavior than how the process was working on CF7. I have the Spool threshold set to 20 seconds on both the old and new servers but no matter what spool interval I set on the new CF9 server, it is processing one email at a time out of the spool.

I just moved a site that has a large collection of pdf files that are searchable though a verity collection from being hosted on Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2 Web Edition. Much to my disbelief, I was unable to download many of the pdf files on the new server. After doing a little searching I found out that there is a known issue with IIS 7.5 and serving pdf files. According to chatter on the net the problem revolves around how IIS 7.5 does byte-range requests and a bug in the Adobe Reader plugins. More information is available on the this thread at forums.iis.net.

I thought I would post about a some of the useful open source or free utilities that I use on a daily basis. I would love to hear about other useful free or open source applications that others use in the comments.