# Ruby processes spawning rapidly

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-processes-spawning-rapidly/137678>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [May 15, 2008, 9:10am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-processes-spawning-rapidly/137678 "2008-05-15T09:10:38Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Coles](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/65b543/32.png) [@Coles](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Coles)\
**Post date:** [May 15, 2008, 9:10am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-processes-spawning-rapidly/137678/1 "2008-05-15T09:10:38Z")

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This would be my first time posting here and I’m hoping to get some  
enlightenment on my problem.

I have Mac OS X Server Leopard v10.5.2 with 4GB of RAM. We recently  
had a new site developed for our company and it was developed on ROR.

I’m running an out of the box configuration for Ruby on Rails.  
Bluecloth is installed but everything else is stock. The database is  
MySQL.

The app is created on Windows workstations and then deployed to a svn  
repository that runs on Linux. To get the app running in my  
environment I had to troubleshoot and make a few tweaks to the rb  
config files to run the app. Each time our provider would make  
changes to our site they would send me the revised files via email and  
I would put them in place and restart my web services.

I have since set up SSH so that our provider could push out updates to  
my server without any intervention by me via subversion. We have  
subversion and the symbolic links all set up and running. But ever  
since these changes have been made my rails app has gone crazy on me.  
Fastcgi will intermittently spawn 10-13 ruby processes one after the  
other rapidly. Some of the ruby processes will eat 1-3MB of RAM per  
1-2 seconds and will eventually take all 4GB of RAM that the server  
has and then the app will stop responding.

Our provider has looked over the Apache logs as well as the logs in  
the rails app itself and they tell me I need to configure mod\_fastcgi  
to only allow so many ruby processes to run. On their linux server  
they have mod\_fastcgi configured to run static with only (2) ruby  
processes.

I’m not a web developer or a web guru- just a simple server  
administrator that can’t seem to find any information out there  
related to my problem. One thing to note is that the old site I was  
updating manually when changes were made never had this problem and  
still doesn’t. I’ve compared config files in my rails app and  
everything is essentially the same.

Since our service provider knows nothing about OS X and how it’s  
configured, they can’t assist me very well.

Any help or suggestions would be great!

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Coles](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/65b543/32.png) [@Coles](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Coles)\
**Post date:** [May 15, 2008, 9:21am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-processes-spawning-rapidly/137678/2 "2008-05-15T09:21:19Z")

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Well the obvious thing is to see how those essentially similar files  
differ. By your own admission you’re not an expert so their might be  
something subtle lurking there.  
It’s been a while since I used fastcgi but there used to be a log file  
where it would log stuff like it crashing & having to restart, might  
have some interesting info.  
As far as I recall configuring the number of fastcgi process is done  
either in the .htaccess file in the rails app’s public folder, or in  
the corresponding virtual host entry in apache’s configuration.

Fred