rails 2 and slow external services

[ghazel at gmail.com]

On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 9:27 AM, Eric Wong <normalperson at yhbt.net> wrote:
> ghazel at gmail.com wrote:
>> Hm. Well I was unaware that there was any timeout issue with my
>> application. When a Unicorn process timed out and died, how did the
>> request not timeout with nginx? Was it re-submitted to another worker?
>
> A timeout issue is one *possible* cause of the errors you were seeing
> from nginx.  Of course you know the application better than I do, so,
> I'm not certain it was a timeout issue, just a likely cause of the
> errors.  Did your Unicorn error logs tell you if there were any
> timeouts?

Nothing in the Unicorn logs ever indicated an error like that. I
believe I found the cause though, and this did not seem to affect
Unicorn:

 - I was not using config.threadsafe! (should probably mention that
with the Rainbows! + Rails docs somewhere)
 - I was attempting to JSON serialize request.env. It seems there are
real objects in env, which when you try to serialize them cause your
application to hang forever. Bleh.

-Greg