[Mongrel] stability

[Jeroen Houben]

Zed A. Shaw wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Nov 2006 22:07:51 +0100
> Jeroen Houben <jeroen at supercool.nl> wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>>
>> Are there any recommendations as to what is currently the most stable 
>> setup is for mongrel & apache? I read somewhere (probably here) that you 
>> should avoid using PStore for sessions. Are there  any more of such 
>> recommendations? Also, what is currently the safest version of mongrel 
>> to use in production?
> 
> General warning is using any external libraries that require sharing OS level resources (files, sockets, shmem, file locks) should be avoided or very strictly tested and controlled.  Additionally, if you *must* use these put them into a separate DRb server and make it the single control point for the resources.

I use Ruby's built-in  IO functions to fetch some external RSS and do 
some file caching. Would you consider this a hazard? I had a Rails site 
that had gone 500 when it couldn't connect to  the external feed. This 
was due to a lack of error checking on my behalf. The weird thing was 
that other Rails sites on the same box also stopped responding. I know 
this is a vague problem description, I'll try and get to the logs and 
see if I can spot anything.


> Also, try to avoid RMagick processing inside rails.  People love their file_column, but RMagick is a fat nasty pig that cripples many sites without warning.  The optimal setup is use something like BackgrounDRb or a plain DRb server and use a batch processing method.
> 
> That's the main warnings right now.

Thanks Zed.

Jeroen