How to make ColdFusion sleep

by Pete Freitag

Many people have had the need for a ColdFusion page to sleep, typically between iterations of a loop. There is a tag called CFX_Sleep in the Tag Gallery, but in ColdFusion MX you don't need a CFX tag to make the current processing thread sleep using the static sleep method on the java.lang.Thread class, part of the standard java platform. Because CFMX doesn't allow us to call a static method without an object reference, we have to first use CreateObject, or CFOBJECT to get an instance of a java.lang.Thread object. We then call the Thread.sleep(long) method, which takes in the number of milliseconds to sleep for. 
<cfset thread = CreateObject("java", "java.lang.Thread")>
About to sleep for 5 seconds...<cfflush>
<cfset thread.sleep(5000)>
Done sleeping.

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Comments

Patrick Steil

BTW, this also works on CF5!!!!

Steve Tringali

Two words: Thank you.

Eduard

I had this error when I patched this code on my template. Pls Help! Unhandled System exception ! Failed to create JavaVM. JNI_CreateJavaVM returned error code JNI_ERR (this may indicate an unrecognized option string)

William Kossack

neat! We have a large CF app that has recently migrated from CF 5. I'm investigating a duplicate thread problem that has been discovered. The app produces a second thread with the same time stamp in the log. I've seen it with inserts into a database where errors are returned when a key is duplicated by the duplicate thread. Is there any way of catching duplicate threads in CF?

Hughes

This code worked fine when in a CFM to show some text wait 5 seconds and then show some more text. When I moved it to a CFC file the 5 second pause was there but the first set of text did not show up until after the pause. Is this something that can not be done with Components??? Thanks