FCGI Scripts: spawner/reaper

Rails
1

We are doing performance testing for Rails site that will be going live
soon
and probably see a fair amount of traffic.

We are currently using FCGI for deployment (though we may switch to SCGI
down the line as it matures).

I noticed the addition of a few FCGI related scripts to Rails, such as
reaper and spawner.

Has anyone used these? Any experiences to share?

Should I consider them mandatory if I am using FCGI for deployment?

Thanks.

2

On Dec 5, 2005, at 2:49 PM, Hunter H. wrote:

Has anyone used these? Any experiences to share?

Should I consider them mandatory if I am using FCGI for deployment?

Thanks.

Hunter-

I have a write up from August about the development and deployment

of a fairly large rails site for the Yakima Herald newspaper. Maybe
this helps give you a little perspective? http://brainspl.at/
articles/2005/11/03/from-start-to-launch-http-yakimaherald-com

Cheers-
-Ezra Z.
Yakima Herald-Republic
WebMaster
http://yakimaherald.com
509-577-7732
[email protected]

3

Thanks very much for sharing your story. Interesting stuff.

Still, if anyone has used either of these scripts, I am interested in
your
experience:

script/process/reaper
script/process/spawner
script/process/spinner

Thx.

4

Hunter H. wrote:

Thanks very much for sharing your story. Interesting stuff.

Still, if anyone has used either of these scripts, I am interested in your
experience:

script/process/reaper
script/process/spawner
script/process/spinner

I use reaper all the time. It’s the most efficient way to reload a
production
Rails app after a code change. I haven’t had any need to use spawner or
spinner
as of yet, so I really can’t comment on them. But reaper works great.

-Brian

5

On 12/6/05, Hunter H. [email protected] wrote:

Still, if anyone has used either of these scripts, I am interested in your
experience:

script/process/reaper
script/process/spawner
script/process/spinner

  1. spawner - it’s a very thin wrapper around spawn-fcgi (which is
    comming with lighttpd installation, used for creating standalone (not
    managed by the web server) listeners). It’s just one line command with
    several lines for environment setting:

OPTIONS[:instances].times { |i| spawn(OPTIONS[:port] + i) }

starting ‘times’ instances of spawn-fcgi , starting from :port .
spawn-fcgi can be used also directly - see [
http://rubyists.com/articles/2005/05/03/spawn-fcgi-in-the-foreground ]

  1. spinner - “It’s a brute-force attempt that’ll just try to run the
    spawner every X number of seconds”.

  2. reaper - keeping track of the spawned fcgi listeners for managing
    them - restart etc.

spinner + reaper can be replaced with runit - [
runit - a UNIX init scheme with service supervision ] or supervise - [
http://cr.yp.to/daemontools/supervise.html ] from the DJB daemontools
package [ http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html ]

6

Hunter H. wrote:

Thanks very much for sharing your story. Interesting stuff.

Still, if anyone has used either of these scripts, I am interested in your
experience:

script/process/reaper
script/process/spawner
script/process/spinner

Thx.

Hi. In case you hadn’t found it, there is some documentation here, in
the SwitchTower manual:

http:manuals.rubyonrails.com/read/chapter/100#page268

regards

Justin