Question

I’ve recently deployed my first Rails application on a Mac mini running Lion 10.7.2 with Apache and Phusion Passenger. It’s a quad core machine with 2 gigs of ram on it. The server seems to be fine at first, handling only a handful of requests. However, after the requests start increasing it locks up. This is my first server deployment of ROR and I’m not quit sure what I should be checking. I’ve looked at the ruby processes running and it has around 5 or 6.

The application is extremely database and AJAX intensive.

I’ve read through other posts about optimizing Phusion Passenger, but it doesn’t seem to help. My httpd.conf file looks like the following:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName http://domain.com/
    DocumentRoot /Users/lab/WebApplications/next_browse_app/public   
    PassengerSpawnMethod conservative

     # Speeds up spawn time tremendously -- if your app is compatible. 
     # RMagick seems to be incompatible with smart spawning
     RailsSpawnMethod smart

     # Keep the application instances alive longer. Default is 300 (seconds)
     PassengerPoolIdleTime 1000

     # Keep the spawners alive, which speeds up spawning a new Application
     # listener after a period of inactivity at the expense of memory.
     RailsAppSpawnerIdleTime 0

     # Just in case you're leaking memory, restart a listener 
     # after processing 5000 requests
     PassengerMaxRequests 5000
     PassengerMaxPoolSize 4
     PassengerMaxInstancesPerApp 4

 <Directory /Users/lab/WebApplications/next_browse_app/public>
     AllowOverride all              
Allow from all   
    Options -MultiViews            
  </Directory>

Any help is very much appreciated! Thanks!

Answer 1

It turns out that my rails application was using Ruby gems Mongo 1.4.1 and BSON 1.4.1, which were yanked due to memory leaks. Therefore, a simple upgrade from the gems solved the issue. Also, using tailing the logs of Apache and using passenger-memory-stats helped find the issue.