CF Builder2 hanging issues

Question

We recently started installing CF Builder2 on developer machines, and almost all of them are reporting serious hanging issues with the computers locking up.
Has anyone experinced/experiencing this problem?

Answer 1

Yes, @umuayo, there can be many explanations for CFB hanging. I discuss a few here, but more than just pot-shot guesses, I also offer some specific diagnostic steps you can take to hopefully find and resolve such problems.
One common cause I recall hearing is when you have your CFB project set to look at files on a share (rather than on a local drive to CFB).
Consider that CFB is doing a lot more than just “editing a file”. It’s doing syntax checking on the fly, it’s looking up methods in CFCs, files you can include, tables and columns in databases as you type SQL, and all manner of other helpful operations…all of which can be expensive for it to figure out depending on your configuration.
There are also some operations that are done either on startup, or on certain other operations you may do only once in a while.
So when you say it hangs up, when does it do so? At startup? After some period of time? On doing some particular operation? And of those may help you narrow down the cause.
One helpful tip is to open the Progress View in CFBuilder (Window > Show View > Other ). That shows background tasks that are run when you do various things within builder, especially communications going on back and forth between CFB and any server you may have it talking to. If you have that view open all the time (best viewed at the bottom of the window to be wide), you may see what it was starting to do when things hung up.
Still another common problem is that people find that the problem is that the JVM (within CFBuilder) is running out of heap. Just as CF can hang and crash when that happens, so too can CFB (independent of CF, of course.)  You can tweak the max heap size (xmx argument) in the startup properties for CFB. If you’re using the standalone edition (versus running CFB as a plugin), you’d tweak the cfbuilder.ini file in the directory where CFBuilder is installed. If you’re running as a plugin, I’d recommend you research how to change the JVM args based on your OS, version of Eclipse, how you start it, etc.
Also related to memory, you can also set CFB (and Eclipse) to show you a heap size use indicator (and even request a GC), with the feature that appears at the bottom of the editor window when you go to Preferences>General then click Show heap status.
Similar to the above, but different, another thing people have found is a problem on 64-bit Windows, which is resolved with another simple change in the startup args (changing it from using javaw.exe to using jvm.dll for the jvm). For more on that, see these two blogs: http://www.websolete.com/posts/cfbuilder-2-performance-problems-on-windows-7-64-bit-solved and http://www.coldfusionmuse.com/index.cfm/2012/1/27/cfbuilder-performance-64bit-plugin.
Finally, and perhaps the easiest thing to consider: you mention being on “CFBuilder 2”. You don’t clarify if that’s really 2.0 or 2.0.1, the free update that came out at the same time as CF10. That has various performance fixes, listed in a section at  <http://www.adobe.com/devnet/coldfusion/articles/cfbuilder201-whatsnew.html> http://www.adobe.com/devnet/coldfusion/articles/cfbuilder201-whatsnew.html, including a mention of some features that can have a performance impact that you may want to watch out for.
Also, if you are still on CFB 2.0 and choose to remain there for some reason, there was a hotfix for that,  <http://www.adobe.com/support/coldfusion/downloads_updates.html#cfb2> http://www.adobe.com/support/coldfusion/downloads_updates.html#cfb2.
Hope that helps. Let me know what you think.
/charlie
PS there are a few blog entries out that address CFBuilder performance. If for some reason the above don’t help, consider these as well, though do note that some could be from the CFB1 or CFB2.0 era and may not be as relevant for CFB2.0.1:
http://www.rupeshk.org/blog/index.php/2010/05/cfbuilder-tip-tailview-can-kill-server-perfo rmance/
http://www.ravenglass.com/blog/index.cfm/2012/7/2/Fixing-CFBuilders-sometimes-slow-and-unr esponsive-behavior
http://blog.mxunit.org/2009/07/speeding-up-coldfusion-builder.html
http://blog.mxunit.org/2008/12/speeding-up-eclipse.html
http://www.thoughtdelimited.org/thoughts/post.cfm/improving-coldfusion-builder-performance -temporarily-when-editing-large-files
https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1bBja77ShTkWDQJROzQbAUIs8YO3WSuQOaduuC15WtrA
http://cfmumbojumbo.com/cf/index.cfm/coding/increase-cfbuilder-performance/