FastCGI - incomplete headers + 500 error

Rails
1

Hi,

I know this topic has been discussed before, but I tried every solutions
still cannot solve it.

The thing is, I run my rails app in dreamhost, with FastCGI.
(rails-0.14.3+
ruby-fcgi-0.8.6 + fcgi-2.4.0)
I can start my app, but I keep hitting 500 error randomly. That is, for
the
same page, I will get 500 sometimes, but ok after reload.

This is what I got from fastcgi.crash.log

[…] asked to terminate immediately
[…] terminated by explicit exit exit

And in apache log

… FastCGI: incomplete headers (0 bytes) received from server
“/home/…/public/dispatch.fcgi”

I search all the forum on the web, and these are what I have done.

  1. change public/.htaccess to RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi [QSA,L]
  2. chmod 755 for dispatch.fcgi, and log directory
  3. check the ruby path (#!/path/local/bin/ruby) in dispatch.fcgi
  4. make sure dispatch.fcgi is not dos format (run dos2unix)

But it still doesn’t work after I have done all of these.

Then I tried these

http://convergentarts.com/articles/2005/08/16/new-fcgi_handler-rb-cuts-500-errors-or-so
copy the lastest
fcgi_handler.rbhttp://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/trunk/railties/lib/fcgi_handler.rbto
lib
but actually it’s unnecessary because that file is exactly the same
as I
have in rails 0.14-3
- still doesn’t work

  1. http://forum.textdrive.com/viewtopic.php?id=2972
    according to this, fcgi has some problem from gem, so I uninstall
    fcgi
    gem, and make ruby-fcgi-0.8.6
    from source.

    • the 500 error times reduce, but will still hit it.

  2. downgrade rails to 0.13.1, no help

  3. try to run dispatch.fcgi manually

    ruby dispatch.fcgi

    I got : Status: 500 Internal Server Error
    Is that normal ? Can you run dispatch.fcgi manually?

That really drives me crazy.
I don’t know what else I can try, please give me advise if you think of
any.
Thanks!

Gary

2

Finally, I use a work-around solution before anybody can tell me a
better
answer.

I modified ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rails-0.14.3/lib/fcgi_handler.rb as below.

def exit_now_handler(signal)
dispatcher_log :info, “asked to terminate immediately”
## force to restart
dispatcher_log :info, “but we will restart”
restart_handler(signal)
#exit
end

For signal TERM, I force dispatch.fcgi not to exit but restart. It looks
weird but at least works for me. User will not see 500 error anymore,
and
will only need to wait a while to restart dispatch.fcgi if something
goes
wrong.

Gary