upgrading from CF6 to CF8 - verity reminder

Today I upgraded one of our servers from CF6 to CF8.  Over all the server upgrade went well.  One big gotcha for me however, and I figured this may happen to others.

CF6 handles verity collections differently than cf7 or cf8.  Because of this difference the amount of RAM used is MUCH MUCH larger with cf7 or cf8.  Before if you had a bunch of empty verity collections, no big deal.  Now each collection, regardless of data in it or not will take a minimum of a few megs of ram or more.  Doesn't sound like a big deal, but this has caught many people by surprise and something I forgot to check for during my upgrade.

We had at some point long ago been testing some code and made LOTS of collections that were empty on our server.  Probably close to 100.  (100x ?mb each = over 2gb for me)  During the upgrade the final step is for the server to start up, and finish its import of settings.  I believe at that point it is setting up the new collections and it is at that point that my install timed out.  Took 15+ minutes then timed out on CFOutput (didn't time it).  I reload, same thing.  I reboot and sites start working again, but the install is still stuck on that step.  I notice that my server is now maxed out on RAM. 

At this point it is difficult to remove the verity collections as you can't get into admin since the install process isn't officially done.  So what I did was shut down the search service for CF.  This immediately released all the RAM.  I then reran the install step which after a while actually finished and let me into the admin.  I went to the verity collections admin page, and there were no collections of course.  I started the service back up and the collections showed, but didn't load into memory.  I then manually removed one by one.

There is a way to remove them via registry and file system, but I really didn't want to mess with that.

Bottom line, if you are upgrading from CF6 to CF8 check your verity collections and make sure you have enough RAM ahead of time.