how easy is it to crash web server?

[vfp2cf]

I'm a VFP developer in the newbie stage of learning ColdFusion and have been givin an assignment to alter a wonderfully designed CF web site. I'm actually just adding a page that doesn't need to do any database stuff.

How hard (or easy) is it to crash the web server with a CF page?

So like, what are the top two things that would cause this to happen?

 

[SidianConsulting]

Well there are plenty of things you could do to crank the memory and cpu usage of ColdFusion into the stratosphere, but one of the major ones is an infinite loop, which would be done by using a loop with an expression that would not allow the loop to end, or making an implicit loop like:

<cfloop condition=&quot;0=0&quot;>

This could also be done is cfscript; a loop is a loop in ColdFusion so be careful with them, especially ones where you aren't sure how they'll run.

Some programmers use loops like this to keep processing a segment of code and then break out of it manually on their own, but you should know exactly what you are doing when you mess with this technique.

You could also hang the server with cfobject and cfgraph (think there was a CF5 bug in that tag, which has a hotfix), once again depending on if you know exactly what you are doing or not.

-Tek