Mongrel zooms to 75% memory (750MB!) randomly

Rails
1

I have a rails app

  • ubuntu feisty
  • apache 2.2
  • mod proxy
  • 4 mongrels in a cluster
  • 1g ram

About once a day, the memory usage (as reported by top) of one of the
mongrels will zip from the normal 4% to 75% and never come back. At
that point, the system is basically hosed and that mongrel needs to be
restarted.

There’s alot of activity on this system, and I am having a hard time
trying to pinpoint this problem.

Any advise ???

2

I doubt its mongrel per se by the way, more likely something in my
app, but still finding it is not easy.

3

Hi,

You can try http://blog.evanweaver.com/pages/code#bleak_house which
has the slight overhead of building a custom binary ( rake task ).

  • Lourens
4

On 24 May 2007, at 16:40, uncle wrote:

restarted.

There’s alot of activity on this system, and I am having a hard time
trying to pinpoint this problem.

Any advise ???

Could it be during an RMagick operation or file upload? This happened
to me once a while back, but I think a gem update fixed my problem,
because it was a one-time problem.

Best regards

Peter De Berdt

5

uncle wrote:

restarted.

There’s alot of activity on this system, and I am having a hard time
trying to pinpoint this problem.

Any advise ???

Do you maybe use send_file to stream big files back to user?
I have similiar problem with memory consumption and it was send_file…

best,
Bojan

–
Bojan M.
→ Ruby on Rails and Web D. Blog : http://source.mihelac.org

6

Hi, do you have an isolated development box that you can use to
diagnose the issue that you’re seeing in production? Also, what
applications are running when this issue occurs? Last but not least,
what exactly does your application do and could you provide
information about the version of rails and third-party gems/plugins
that you’re using for this application?

-Conrad

7

Thanks for the ideas, but there is no rmagick involved in this app,
and no uploading !