Hi, I've recently updated an application to 3.1.1 and Capistrano started to fail at the assets:precompile task. It's a strange bug that don't always happen (it actually worked a couple of time) and there's no error message, it only display "Killed". Running the rake task locally work though. I've reverted to 3.1.0 and now it work with Capistrano.
Has something changed in 3.1.1 in regard to assets:precompile when used from Capistrano?
Are you deploying to a shared host such as Dreamhost?
I can't back it up with any proof, but if you are, my guess is that during deployment, you are hitting CPU or memory usage limits and a process watcher on the shared host is killing your compilation process.
I've had some success in this case by manually uploading the precompiled assets the first time only. From their on, the assets:precompile task shouldn't be recompile assets that haven't changed... so that might save you some CPU/memory, perhaps enough that your deployment will resume normal functionality.