mongrel zooms to 75% memory (750MB!!!) randomly

rubyonrails-talk
1

I have a rails app - ubuntu feisty - apache 2.2 - mod proxy - 4 mongrels in a cluster - 1g ram

About once a day, the memory usage (as reported by top) of one of the mongrels will zip from the normal 4% to 75% and never come back. At that point, the system is basically hosed and that mongrel needs to be restarted.

There's alot of activity on this system, and I am having a hard time trying to pinpoint this problem.

Any advise ???

2

I doubt its mongrel per se by the way, more likely something in my app, but still finding it is not easy.

3

Hi,

You can try http://blog.evanweaver.com/pages/code#bleak_house which
has the slight overhead of building a custom binary ( rake task ).

- Lourens

4

Could it be during an RMagick operation or file upload? This happened to me once a while back, but I think a gem update fixed my problem, because it was a one-time problem.

Best regards

Peter De Berdt

5

Thanks for the ideas, but there is no rmagick involved in this app, and no uploading !

6

uncle wrote:

I have a rails app - ubuntu feisty - apache 2.2 - mod proxy - 4 mongrels in a cluster - 1g ram

About once a day, the memory usage (as reported by top) of one of the mongrels will zip from the normal 4% to 75% and never come back. At that point, the system is basically hosed and that mongrel needs to be restarted.

There's alot of activity on this system, and I am having a hard time trying to pinpoint this problem.

Any advise ???

>

Do you maybe use send_file to stream big files back to user? I have similiar problem with memory consumption and it was send_file...

best, Bojan

7

Hi, do you have an isolated development box that you can use to diagnose the issue that you're seeing in production? Also, what applications are running when this issue occurs? Last but not least, what exactly does your application do and could you provide information about the version of rails and third-party gems/plugins that you're using for this application?

-Conrad