# Lighty+Mongrel unresponsive after so many requests

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/lighty-mongrel-unresponsive-after-so-many-requests/55529>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [March 21, 2006, 9:43pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/lighty-mongrel-unresponsive-after-so-many-requests/55529 "2006-03-21T21:43:31Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/b9e5f3/32.png) [@joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/joe)\
**Post date:** [March 21, 2006, 9:43pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/lighty-mongrel-unresponsive-after-so-many-requests/55529/1 "2006-03-21T21:43:31Z")

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I transferred a site from Lighty+SCGI to Lighty+Mongrel, and now I’m  
having problems with it becoming unresponsive. It works fine for about  
10-15 minutes, but then attempts to access the site just stall forever.  
Nothing is written in any of lighty’s or mongrel’s logs. Here’s my  
lighty config:

$HTTP[“host”] =~ “[www.xyz.com](http://www.xyz.com)” {  
proxy.balance = “fair”  
proxy.server = ( “/” =\> (  
(“host” =\> “127.0.0.1”, “port” =\> 8010),  
(“host” =\> “127.0.0.1”, “port” =\> 8011),  
(“host” =\> “127.0.0.1”, “port” =\> 8012),  
(“host” =\> “127.0.0.1”, “port” =\> 8013),  
(“host” =\> “127.0.0.1”, “port” =\> 8014),  
) )  
}

And I start the mongrels with:

mongrel\_rails start -n 5 -d -e production -P log/mongrel-10.pid -p 8010  
…

Any idea what the problem is? I just updated mongrel to the latest  
version, but that didn’t fix the problem. It’s just this site that’s  
having the problem too - others continue to work fine while this one’s  
unresponsive. But this site also gets a lot more traffic, so that may  
have something to do with it (but the server has plenty of free RAM and  
CPU). I tried switching the proxy balance to “hash”, which worked about  
the same (and became unresponsive after about 10-15 mins); and  
“round-robin” didn’t work long at all before displaying 5xx errors.

Joe

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/b9e5f3/32.png) [@joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/joe)\
**Post date:** [March 21, 2006, 10:50pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/lighty-mongrel-unresponsive-after-so-many-requests/55529/2 "2006-03-21T22:50:52Z")

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Well, I switched from Mongrel to SCGI on this site about an hour ago and  
it’s still running fine, so I guess the problem was Mongrel :(.

One thing I noticed on my other sites running Mongrel, which get far  
less traffic, is that after a lot of requests they’d get slower and  
slower - taking about 1-3 seconds to load, as opposed to instantaneous.  
Restarting Mongrel restored performance.

Joe

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/b9e5f3/32.png) [@joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/joe)\
**Post date:** [March 22, 2006, 8:17am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/lighty-mongrel-unresponsive-after-so-many-requests/55529/3 "2006-03-22T08:17:10Z")

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Thanks Joe,

I’ll be taking a look at that, but if you can grab me off line so I can  
chat  
with you about the server. I sent you an offline e-mail with my info.

Zed A. Shaw

> **[Zed A. shaw](https://zedshaw.com/)**
>
> Personal essays and writings by Zed A. Shaw.

P.S. Just in case it’s not obvious, I wrote Mongrel (with some help).