Error, Where Art Thou?
Every good web page needs to have an error handler. It is essential. It is leaned upon to display pretty little messages when something goes boom on the server that may or may not have been caused by the user. However, what happens when your error handler throws an error? Well, it’s caught by the error handler…. that throws an error… and is caught again by the error handler….
This fun little conundrum is what I ran into earlier this week in diagnosing a page that just seemed to sit there doing nothing for about a minute before displaying error text that should have been handled by the error handler. Thankfully, Coldfusion is smart enough to only chug on a infinite loop like that for only so long before it gives up. Otherwise, something like this could have brought the server to it’s knees — and we would have been none the wiser.
Some symptoms to look for if this happens to you:
- You have an error handler that doesn’t seem to be working
- Your page displays cryptic error messages that don’t really make sense
- Your page takes an exorbitantly long time to run before resulting in above behavior
I’m not sure exactly why, maybe it was because I was tired at the end of the day, but I found this particular problem rather amusing. Well, you’re also talking to a guy who managed to create a memory leak in a scripting language… (and I’m proud of that in a sick sort of way), but that’s another story for a different day….