I've been setting up our super-awesome new server this week and last night I ran into an issue that I thought I should blog about.

This is a Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit machine with 8GB RAM and I am installing ColdFusion 9 running on Tomcat 6. And, as with everything Tomcat related, it was a pain in the ass and the documentation sucked.

To add Tomcat as a Windows service is pretty easy.

You just run:

For those that don't understand the notation above, CATALINA_HOME is the directory where Tomcat is. So in my case, we are going to N:\tomcat\bin and running service.bat.

This sets up Tomcat as a service, but by default it only gives it some tiny bit of memory to work with (256m or something, like it's 2002 again). So, of course, the moment I deployed a second instance of ColdFusion 9 on this container, I started getting "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space" errors.

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Wow. Things have been busy and I have been neglecting my blog. I feel bad about that. My blog is so important to me, and things have been keeping me away.

I am a teacher at heart. I love to teach. That is why I blog, that is why I present at conferences, and that is why I am going to grad school. So the fact that I have been unable to blog for a while upsets me greatly. But I want to tell you a little bit about why. This is not about making excuses. This is about what is keeping me busy and what I am learning about. It will also motivate me to blog about these things, and that's the important part.

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