How do you start ColdFusion MX 7?

The ColdFusion MX 7 Application Server service is started from the Windows Services control panel. If the application service fails, none of the ColdFusion pages will run.

If your ColdFusion Application service is crashing regularly, look at the JVM settings, especially those for minimum and maximum memory. The service will need to be allocated enough memory to handle your application, but not so much that performance is degraded by the Java garbage collector. For larger ColdFusion applications, the JVM should be fine-tuned by someone with experience with that task, as it can really enhance the performance of your application under load.

When you start ColdFusion (installed as "Server Configuration") via the Windows service you will see two related processes. One is jrun.exe, which is the actual ColdFusion server running in a JRun instance. The other is jrunsvc.exe which is a parent process whose only purpose is to monitor the jrun.exe process and restart it if that child process exits.

To know if jrunsvc.exe is restarting the child jrun.exe, check your logs. To demonstrate, on a test machine, try killing jrun.exe with task manager and you'll see a new jrun.exe starts up right away.