I wanted to get technical input on something related to our ColdFusion setup.
We’ve configured 20 ColdFusion instances on one server, and each instance has a Java max heap size of 4500 MB. Now, let’s say each of these instances tries to generate a PDF file that’s around 5000 MB—so larger than the configured heap size.
Would this scenario lead to an out-of-memory issue?
Just to add, the host machine has 93 GB of RAM.
Appreciate your thoughts on this!
Newbie
1 posts
Not necessarily. The production of a pdf of a given size doesn’t HAVE TO equate to needing to use that much memory (heap).
That said, you’ve not said what means you’re using to generate this pdf. That’s important. If it’s cfhtmltopdf, that’s actually produced OUTSIDE of cf (and so may have nothing to do with the cf heap size). Instead, those are generated in the cf “add on service”, which is a instance of jetty–not only a separate process from cf, but also which has its own heap size configuration.
Before I elaborate, please confirm first how you’re generating the PDFs.
Second, you’ve not said if you’re getting an error. Are you? From cf? From a log? What log? And what error?
Finally, beware that your 20 instances of 4.5gb could meam 90 of your 93gb could be used. That doesn’t leave much headroom (but all 20 instances would need to really use all their maxheap, which may not happen often). There’s also more to memory used by a cf process than just the max heap. There’s also metaspace as well as OS process memory use.
Finally, a 5gb pdf seems pretty huge. Are you sure it needs to be that big? Maybe there are different ways to affect that size.
But I realize that’s not your focus for now. Hope something above will help.
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22 Sep 2025
Las Vegas, NV
