How to set a time-limit for mongrel?

Rails
1

Hi,

we have a problem with a small-sized Rails application. It is
currently in productive use, and sometimes the customer reports
unavailability of the application.

Today I could watch one of these occasions live and connect to the
server while the application was down. Both mongrel servers were using
100% cpu and a wast amout of memory, they seemed to be blocked by some
large operation (probably a bug in some report generating
functionality of the application)

I don’t see any chance to fix the bug soon, so my question is, how can
I set a time-limit on those mongrel servers?

The configuration:

  • Linux Debian
  • Apache mod_proxy
  • 2 Mongrel servers

Somehow mongrel should be restarted, when one request takes more time
than 1 minute. I don’t see a way to do this. Any help would be greatly
appreciated.

  • Andi
2

I don’t see any chance to fix the bug soon, so my question is, how can
I set a time-limit on those mongrel servers?

I don’t have the answer, so this isn’t a very helpful post! Back in my
.asp days, we’d set a Server.Timeout to a given number of seconds.
This sort of thing would work for you.

On mongrel.rubyforge.org, there’s some stuff about “Ability to specify
a timeout throttling setting and a max number of concurrent
connections with additional attempts at cleaning dead threads out”.

3

  1. Look at your code. Find out what’s causing the mongrels to misbehave.
    More often than not it’s a code problem.

  2. Are you using RMagick? That’s caused me some problems.

  3. Use Monit. There are some great resources for mongrel + monit. You
    can
    use monit to stop / restart mongrels after various conditions occur.

http://www.igvita.com/blog/2006/11/07/monit-makes-mongrel-play-nice/

http://software.pmade.com/blogs/ramblings/2006/12/27/mongrel-cluster-and-monit

4

Thanks for your answers.

I will try monit, it sounds promising.