[Mongrel] running mongrel in production on win32

[Ball, Donald A Jr (Library)]

> > I'm using mongrel-0.3.13.3-mswin32, the latest publicly available
> > mswin32 gem, along with mongrel_service-0.2, though I'm not 
> using the 
> > service in development. I tried to install 0.3.19 but got odd 
> > compilation warnings when I did so and the server failed to start.
> 
> That is the *latest* stable gem available via rubyforge, but 
> no the latest one:
> 
> http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/mongrel-users/2006-December/002352.html

huh, that's handy, might be worthwhile posting that on the mongrel site
somewhere if you want to encourage win32 users to test it.

> Then is rails which is loading mongrel, and not the way 
> around. Please try doing:
> 
> mongrel_rails start
> 
> inside your application folder and see if that report any problem

Sure. Actually, I have a problem to report already... sessions are not
working when I start mongrel in this fashion. Is there somewhere i
should be configuring session behavior that I'm not?

To be more specific, the browser doesn't report a session_id cookie in
its cookie list. The server-side code happily stores objects in the
session, but the session is empty on the next request.

For the record, both webrick and mongrel started via script/server have
working sessions.

> > So you believe I've run into a bug in ruby-1.8.4-mswin32? 
> Looked to me 
> > more like an unhandled exception in activesupport, but the 
> rails folks 
> > seemed to think that was not the case.
> 
> Its look like a bug with the GC, but I only could say that if 
> your application isn't doing something memory intensive or 
> nasty to the whole Ruby VM.

I can pretty much guarantee that's not the case. It's a very vanilla
application, the most weird thing I'm doing is a lot of screen scraping
with Mechanize.

> The current mongrel_service will report when something like 
> that happens, but, mea culpa, I forgot to include timestamp 
> information of that! (will do a fix in the svn).

Cool. Note I haven't yet installed or tested mongrel_service, hope to be
able to do that soon.

> > > Will be very helpful if you provide more information about your 
> > > database (and version), mongrel, rails, ruby and windows 
> version to 
> > > we could get a better picture of your situation.
> >
> > Sure thing. I'm using mssql2k with the ADO driver, 
> mongrel-0.3.13.3, 
> > rails-1.2rc1, ruby-1.8.4, winxpsp2 (but will be deploying 
> to win2k3). 
> > I am using RMagick with file_column, though the crashes 
> have not (yet) 
> > occurred while testing that portion of the application.
> 
> Ok, are you sure about RMagick? you know when your 
> application crashes? doing what, which kind of request, the 
> exact line of the controller or something?

Well, it's only crashed twice, with different stacktraces, so searching
for a common proximate cause is likely to be a fruitless endeavor. I'll
be sure to save all the information if this recurs in the future.

Appreciate the time and advice, and I look forward to helping you get
mongrel for win32 ready for production use.

- donald