We recently made the move from an IIS Windows web server to an Apache *nix based web server as part of our efforts to consolidate our library’s server infrastructure. And for reasons I won’t expound upon, we had one MS Access DSN that didn’t get migrated to MSSQL and that needed to be used still. Since ColdFusion uses a Windows only driver for MS Access, I needed to figure out a way around this. I found a couple of JDBC drivers for Access (Easysoft’s JDBC-ODBC Bridge and HXTT’s Access Pure Java JDBC Drivers), but these seemed to be a bit on the expensive side for the short amount of time that I’d need to keep Access in production.

I did notice on Easysoft’s website that they were using the JdbcOdbc bridge, so after a little bit more digging, I found the syntax to use configure ColdFusion to use MS Access through the JdbcOdbc Bridge; the JDBC URL is

and the Driver Class

For the very basic inserting of data from a seldom-used web form into a single table, this band aid fix has been doing pretty good!

I finally got fed up yesterday with the slow speed at which Eclipse was launching on my Windows box. On my Linux box, it doesn’t take that long to launch (may five or six seconds) compared to my Windows box (around 15 – 20 seconds). I know I have a lot of plugins, but it was getting a little ridiculous. I started poking around and I noticed in the configuration details (Help / About Eclipse SDK / Configuration Details) that the vm that was launching was 1.4. Ok, so there’s one problem. I also noticed that the max memory setting was 256MB (-Xmx256M). Since this box has 2GB of RAM, I figured 256MB is a little on the low side (and note, mucking around with the heap sizes won’t help load times).

The first thing I did was change the shorcut target for Eclipse to be

Now I’m sure that Eclipse will launch with Java 5 and (hopefully) speed things up a bit. Double-click on the short-cut, and sure enough, we’re down to about 8 seconds.

The next thing I wanted to do is increase the default min and max memory settings. In c:\eclipse\eclipse.ini, you’ll see

I changed these to

This increases the minimum memory space to 256M and the maximum to 768M. You can also do this by adding these vmargs to the shortcut target:

If you have a multi-processor computer (and I believe this includes dual-core systems, though I haven’t read the docs on this), you can use some of the new VM ergonomics to self-tune garbage collection by adding this switch:

One last handy parameter is “-showlocation” which shows the current location of your workspace. If you have different workspaces, this is handy.

If you want to read more about some JVM garbage collection (and who doesn’t) here are some helpful links:

• Java SE HotSpot at a Glance
• Garbage Collector Ergonomics
• Tuning Garbage Collection with the 5.0 Java Virtual Machine
• Java Performance Documentation
• A Collection of JVM Options (check out the references at the bottom of the page)