mongrel and launchd alternatives

rubyonrails-talk
1

i used an excellent article a while back to set up a launch daemon for my rails apps on my mac.

now i am at the point where i am ready to move a few things over to production and i'm wondering what the best way of doing this is on other operating systems. currently i am using CentOS 3.8 i686.

what are other people doing to keep their apps running? if one goes down or i have to restart, i'm basically having to go in and start mongrel for every app i have running on the site.

2

Use monit: http://www.tildeslash.com/monit/ and add monit to your init. Assuming you’re using mongrel, it’ll watch them and restart them if necessary.

Vish

3

someone just posted this to the Mongrel list:

http://www.mmediasys.com/releases/mongrel_service-0.3.1-mswin32.gem

Whats new?

Beside the things added in previous announcement [1], this version add basic process monitoring.

What that means?

If for some reason the mongrel process (also a ruby process) suddenly

dies (maybe a runtime error), the service will automatically re-create a new process.

So, in intervals of 5 seconds, if your process die, it will be recreated.

That will reduce the uptime problems of your applications, right?

Later this weekend will add the cluster capability, so Windows no longer envy users running *nix or OSX :wink:

Oh, BTW, if you don’t want to add a service in windows, you could “simulate” it using console command:

mongrel_service console single -c “c:/path/to/my/rails/app” -p 4000 -e production

Please, all the folks on Windows environment try the latest build of the gem and report problems (if any was found).

Regards,

4

Vishnu Gopal wrote:

Use monit: Easy, proactive monitoring of processes, programs, files, directories, filesystems and hosts | Monit and add monit to your init. Assuming you're using mongrel, it'll watch them and restart them if necessary.

I have to second this recommendation. We just started using monit to monitor our mongrels this past week, and we couldn't be happier. Not only does it monitor whether the service is up or not, it also monitors cpu and memory usage, allowing you to take action appropriately. If that isn't enough, it also provides a simple web interface, giving you up to the minute info on all your processes, allowing you to restart them right from the interface.

Here is an example of the configuration syntax:

check process mongrel_8000 with pidfile /path/to/mongrel.8000.pid      start program "/usr/bin/mongrel_rails cluster::start -C /path/to/mongrel_cluster.yml"      stop program "/usr/bin/mongrel_rails cluster::stop -C /path/to/mongrel_cluster.yml"      # alert me if memory is greater than 40MB      if totalmem > 40.0 MB for 2 cycles then alert      # restart if memory is greater than 50MB      if totalmem > 50.0 MB for 4 cycles then restart