[Mongrel] Mongrel is crashing under heavy loads

[Donald Marino]

Hi

We're running mongrel on CentOS 4.2 with Apache httpd 2.2  
mod_proxy_balancer, mongrel_cluster-0.2.0, Rails 1.1.6, Ruby 1.8.4,  
Pg 8.1.4 backend.

We are on the verge of going live with our site and I am stress  
testing the server.
What we are seeing is under heavy loads, our mongrels will seg fault  
and die one by one.

Following the advice in a previous thread (http://www.mail- 
archive.com/mongrel-users at rubyforge.org/msg01734.html),
  I installed mongrel 0.3.13.5, but the problem remains

The line in particular that appears to  be breaking is:

  $mongrel_sleeper_thread = Thread.new { loop { sleep 1 } }

Found at line 274 of configurator.rb

I do have a core file, but I'm not really proficient with gdb.
I can send it along if someone is interested.

I'm using JMeter to simulate loads on the server. The mongrels only  
seem to die under high loads.
Anyone have any ideas why this isn't stable for us? We'd like to be  
able to go live with this setup if we can figure this out.

Thanks,
Donnie

Donald Marino
donaldmarino at mac dot com