[Brug-talk] rails deployment issues with Dreamhost

[Peter De Berdt (10-forward)]

On 27 Nov 2007, at 12:38, Arne Brasseur wrote:

> You should also be aware that Dreamhost will kill any FastCGI  
> processes that use more than a certain amount of memory. Any users  
> that were being served at that time will get a "Server 500" error.  
> Some people have come up with solutions, take a look at this:
>
> http://gabrito.com/post/keeping-rails-running-at-dreamhost-part-2
>
> And keep if possible the memory footprint of your apps small. Also  
> make a seperate user account for every app. The memory usage is  
> counted per user.
>
> Personally I'm a bit disappointed in DH. They should give better  
> Ruby support considering they use it as a selling point.

Same goes for most other cheap shared hosting solutions, like  
a2hosting etc. Also, they claim to offer you mongrel deployment,  
which in itself isn't really a lie, but it means they'll give you one  
single mongrel to serve your rails app on using a simple ProxyPass  
and ProxyPassReverse directive in the Apache configuration. Cheap  
hosting is all about making the most noise of how many features their  
hosting servers have, but in reality, it's a lot of noise for a very  
flaky service (and it gets a lot worse if you want support for your  
rails deployment).

Example of what might happen: we tried running a fairly simple Rails  
app (simple website) on both DH and a2hosting (customer insisted on  
this cheap solution), but it used RMagick to do some thumbnailing.  
Both hosting companies killed the rails process as soon as RMagick  
kicked in from the acts_as_attachment plugin, attachment_fu didn't  
exist at that time (while they clearly stated i could use rmagick in  
our presales questionnaire). We then hacked acts_as_attachment to use  
minimagick instead, which did seem to keep up the site, but then the  
server started failing on a daily basis because of "DDoS attacks"  
their Indian based support company will use as an excuse whenever  
something goes wrong on the server. On top of that, a server restart  
didn't restart the mongrel automatically at a2hosting.

You're simply better off looking for a decent Rails hosting company  
like openminds in belgium or some of the others regularly mentioned  
on the rails mailing list and cough up the few extra € a month,  
keeping your sanity is worth the higher price. Or even better, learn  
the basics of linux and get a vps if you can afford it.

Best regards.


Peter De Berdt
Research & Development
Software Expert

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