Fusion Reactor
We purchased a copy of Fusion Reactor last week and today I had my first chance to use it. Right off the bat I was extremely impressed. The GUI is very similar to the ColdFusion Administrator and is very easy to get around.
Within the past couple of weeks our production server started experiencing some strange performance issues. We have been seeing some frequent occurrences where the request times would just get longer and longer, and eventually stop responding all together. There are about 6 high volume applications on that server and try as we might, we were never able to reproduce this in a controlled way and point to any particular point that was breaking.
Within about 5 minutes of installing Fusion Reactor, I was able to pinpoint a specific piece of code that was in desperate need of refactoring. Until I could get the piece of code in place, I was able to set Crash Protection in Fusion Reactor which would gracefully kill any troublesome request if it took longer than X seconds. This worked really flawlessly and put the application right back on its feet again when it stumbled into the code.
Fusion Reactor includes many very useful features including:
- Requests
- View currently running requests, including the ability to see stack traces and to kill specific threads.
- View request history
- Threads view current threads
- Rich memory charts/graphs
- Request Metrics reporting
- Filters – This is a cool feature. You can have Fusion Reactor constantly look for specific strings and alter them at request time if you wish. A useful time for this might be a discovery of a typo, or a moved url in a link.
- Crash Protection – It approaches this from several different angles. You can set it for specific request issues, server memory levels, etc.
- There are several more features but those are the ones that stuck in my memory after 20 minutes or so of using it.
Keep in mind the standard version of this is only $99.00 which is very undervalued in my opinion.
