100% CPU usage with Mongrel dev server on Windows

Rails
1

I’m using Mongrel on my Windows XP box, and periodically CPU usage
jumps to 100% and stays there.

The gems versions are:

mongrel (1.1.5)
mysql (2.7.3)

The Rails version is 2.3.2.

This occurs pretty often, but since it doesn’t actually hurts any
development experience (and doesn’t happen on the production server) I
haven’t devoted much time to trying to find the cause.

I was thinking about using pure Ruby MySQL driver - but had no success
there, since it’s really slow and seems unsupported as of now.

I know the server process has a few threads running but since I’m on
Windows it seems to be not that easy to figure out what the threads
are doing exactly.

Probably someone experienced the similar problems already or can at
least enlighten me on how to get the thread stack on Windows.

Thanks in advance,
Evgeniy

PS. I apologize if this is double posted, first time I tried to post
from Google G. (1 day ago) but it seems like my message was either
lost, or will become available later (?)

2

You’d be much happier not developing on Windows in the first place.

If you can’t get a native Linux box, run a VM.

  1. Get VMPlayer for free from VMWare -
    VMware Workstation Player | VMware
  2. Download a Linux image - I like this Ubuntu 9.04 image -
    VMware Marketplace
  3. Set it up to run Rails, MySQL, etc. Here are some directions I
    created to configure it to run RoR: http://pastie.org/549485
    (I use NetBeans as an IDE - some people prefer other editors such as
    Komodo Edit.)

As far as performance, the VM outperforms my native Windows host when
it comes to RoR development, especially when running rake, rspec,
cucumber, etc.
On one project in particular, it takes 20+ seconds to run a small set
of rspec tests on the Windows host, while it only takes 6 seconds to
run the same tests in the Linux VM.

Plus, git is a lot cleaner (don’t particularly like git bash/
TortoiseGit on Windows).

Hope this helps
Eric