backgrounDrb 0.2.1 seemed to cause site inaccessible

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi All,

This is the first time I post to this group. I don't know how much info I should provide so that you can help us to debug. I just put what I thougth would be relevant. If you need more info, please let me know. Thanks.

We are running Rails 1.1.6, Lighttpd, on a Fedora 5 box (MySql is running on a separate box), Linux app 2.6.18-1.2257.fc5 #1 SMP Fri Dec 15 16:07:14 EST 2006 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Before, we used backgrounDrb 0.1.x version. After frequent high CPU usage (>90%), we recently upgraded to 0.2.1 version. Now the average CPU usage is normal (around 20%), but sometimes we see more than one backgrounDrb main process hanging on. Those stale processes were still there even after running backgroundrb stop. So we have to manually kill those old processes.

Another scenario just popped up. While everything seems fine on the Linux box, CPU, processes, etc., the site just cannot be reached. Sometimes we can still SSH into it, sometimes we cannot so had to cold reboot it. When we can still SSH in, we just run backgroudrb stop. Manually kill the /tmp/socket file sometimes. Then run backgroundrb start again. The site will behave normally.

Below is from our config file for backgroundrb : :host: localhost :protocol: drbunix :pool_size: 20 :rails_env: production

Has someone encountered the same kind of problems? Your help is highly appreciated.

Neng

2

Thank you Al. Yes, most of my workers need Rails. If each thread is loaded with the whole application, that would for sure eat much memory. So my workers (mostly for search) are killed as soon as they finish the results.

Actually I had to hack into the source code of backgroundrb because it lacks some functions I need. For example, there is no way to expire the results. Do you know how I can feedback those changes I made to backgroundrb? These changes may be useful to other people too.

We just figured out that our server encountered a hardware problem with our RAID. After we fix it, we will see if backgroundrb works well. I will report back.