[Mongrel] mongrel becoming unresponsive

[Kirk Haines]

On 5/8/07, Pete DeLaurentis <pete at nextengine.com> wrote:
> Thanks for the explanation Luis.  This makes good sense.  It seems
> like Mongrel is intercepting the stdout + sterr (puts it all into
> mongrel.log), but it's not good to work with something that isn't
> threadsafe.

This probably begs some elaboration on just what puts() does.  It
writes your string in one write operation, and does the newline in a
second operation, which opens the possibility that Ruby can make a
context switch between them.  If the newline is already in the string,
though, it is just a single write operation.  You can also use write()
instead of puts() to explicitly make sure that everything is done in a
single write call.

Take a look at the code in io.c for the details.

> Makes me wonder if the rails logs are safe if you write to them from
> different mongrels in a cluster.  Any experience with this?

Even if it can be made "safe", contention from multiple processes
trying to write to one file can be a non-trivial performance hit.
This was one of my motivations for writing an async logger.  I want
all of my app logs in the same place, even if I have multiple backend
processes, without worrying about resource contention.  It's that, or
I have N log files, one for each backend process for my app.


Kirk Haines