Troubleshooting Long Requests

Hello-

I'm using Scout to monitor a Rails app of mine. What I'm noticing is that all of the pages in the site take a fraction of a second to complete. This is totally acceptable. However, occasionally I'll have a request that takes 189 seconds to complete. It's very consistent. A request takes a fraction of a second 99% of the time and takes either 189 seconds or 3.5 seconds that last 1% of the time. Naturally, that 1% of the time is when clients, friends, family, etc. are viewing the site. The actual page that takes 189 or 3.5 seconds to process varies - sometimes it is the homepage, sometimes it is something like the About Us page.

My server setup is as follows. The server is a quad-core machine with 2GB of RAM running RHEL 5. I'm using Nginx as the proxy and mongrel_cluster running 15 mongrel instances. Other than that, I've got MySql, Sphix, and backgroundRB runnning. The server is under very low utilization, only getting a few hundred visitors a day and never consuming more than 1% of the processor and 50% of the memory.

Does anyone have any ideas on how best to troubleshoot this?

Regards, Eric

Hello-

I'm using Scout to monitor a Rails app of mine. What I'm noticing is that all of the pages in the site take a fraction of a second to complete. This is totally acceptable. However, occasionally I'll have a request that takes 189 seconds to complete. It's very consistent. A request takes a fraction of a second 99% of the time and takes either 189 seconds or 3.5 seconds that last 1% of the time. Naturally, that 1% of the time is when clients, friends, family, etc. are viewing the site. The actual page that takes 189 or 3.5 seconds to process varies - sometimes it is the homepage, sometimes it is something like the About Us page.

My server setup is as follows. The server is a quad-core machine with 2GB of RAM running RHEL 5. I'm using Nginx as the proxy and mongrel_cluster running 15 mongrel instances. Other than that, I've got MySql, Sphix, and backgroundRB runnning. The server is under very low utilization, only getting a few hundred visitors a day and never consuming more than 1% of the processor and 50% of the memory.

Does anyone have any ideas on how best to troubleshoot this?

can you reproduce it ? Look at your logs for the times when it has happened, is there a common pattern in terms of the requests? (parameters, things all of those requests do, something else?). Are the requests slow because you're spending loads of time talking to the database, the network, something else? Might something else be holding database locks that block the other pages?

Fred