Question

I have a server with about 30 Ruby On Rails applications.

When I (re)start 1 of the 30 apps, then all other apps are not accessible and they seem to be waiting for the 1 app to (re)start.

Even the command: passenger-status, seems to wait untill the 1 app is (re)started.

Is this normal behavior?
Or how can this be fixed?

(Virtual) Server specifications:

• CPU: 3 cores x 2.2ghz
• Memory: 4GB
• Hardisk: 40GB

Server software:

• CentOS release 6.3 (Final)
• Nginx version: nginx/1.0.12
• Ruby 1.9.3p125 (2012-02-16 revision 34643)[x86_64-linux]
• Phusion Passenger version 3.0.18

Nginx/Passenger config:

passenger_max_pool_size 50;
passenger_min_instances 1;
passenger_max_instances_per_app 2;

I’m happy to help with more details if needed.

Update **
Installed passenger enterprise and nginx, now the apps don’t bother each other anymore with starting.. so I think the problem got fixed with passenger_rolling_restarts on;

Answer 1

Hmm… it looks like this may be a “feature” of Passenger’s open-source version. From http://phusionpassenger.com/enterprise :

In the open source version of Phusion Passenger restarting an application involves shutting down all application processes and spawnining new ones. Because starting a new process can take a long time (depending on the application), visitors may experience slow responses while the restart is in progress. With rolling restarts, Phusion Passenger Enterprise restarts your application processes in the background.

So, the options would appear to be:

1) upgrade to the enterprise edition of Passenger

2) switch to some other server.

Yuck.