Increased CF JVM max heap size and now CF service will not start

Question

So I went in to ColdFusion Administrator and increased my CF JVM max heap size, then I was told I would need to restart the service, so I stopped the service, and then tried to start it again and got the following error message:

Windows could not start the ColdFusion 8 Application Server on Local Computer. For more information, review the System Event Log. If this is a non-Microsoft service, contact the service vendor, and refer to service-specific error code 2.

So I went to the Event Viewer application, then took a look at the Application log and saw an error that said:

The ColdFusion 8 Application Server service could not be started. Check the server "coldfusion" log files for more information.

So I went to my ColdFusion logs directory opened the server.log log file and I don't see anything useful in there or any of the other log files..

Any idea how I can change the JVM heap size back to what it was so that I can start CF again?

Answer 1

This problem may be addressed in :
Maximum JVM heap size greater than 1.8GB will prevent ColdFusion MX from starting

On 32-bit processor machines, the largest contiguous memory address space the operating system can allocate to a process is 1.8GB. Because of this, the maximum heap size can only be set up to 1.8GB. On 64-bit processor machines, the 1.8 GB limit does not apply, as 64-bit processor machines have a larger memory address space.

To correct this issue, the jvm.config file must be modified:

1. Open the cf_root/runtime/bin/jvm.config file in a text editor.
2. Locate the section labeled "# Arguments to VM".
3. Modify the -Xmx variable to set a maximum heap size less than 1.8GB.
   For example: -Xmx1024m
4. Save the file.
5. Restart ColdFusion.

Be careful not too use a value that is too large for the computer. This may have a negative impact on the performance of Windows and on other installed products.