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I've asked this question over at stackoverflow, but I thought someone here might have insight as well.

I've recently deployed my first Rails application on a Mac mini running Lion 10.7.2 with Apache and Phusion Passenger. It's a quad core machine with 2 gigs of ram on it. The server seems to be fine at first, handling only a handful of requests. However, after the requests start increasing it locks up. This is my first server deployment of ROR and I'm not quit sure what I should be checking. I've looked at the ruby processes running and it has around 5 or 6.

The application is extremely database and AJAX intensive.

I've read through other posts about optimizing Phusion Passenger, but it doesn't seem to help. My httpd.conf file looks like the following:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName http://domain.com/
    DocumentRoot /Users/lab/WebApplications/next_browse_app/public   
    PassengerSpawnMethod conservative

     # Speeds up spawn time tremendously -- if your app is compatible. 
     # RMagick seems to be incompatible with smart spawning
     RailsSpawnMethod smart

     # Keep the application instances alive longer. Default is 300 (seconds)
     PassengerPoolIdleTime 1000

     # Keep the spawners alive, which speeds up spawning a new Application
     # listener after a period of inactivity at the expense of memory.
     RailsAppSpawnerIdleTime 0

     # Just in case you're leaking memory, restart a listener 
     # after processing 5000 requests
     PassengerMaxRequests 5000
     PassengerMaxPoolSize 4
     PassengerMaxInstancesPerApp 4

 <Directory /Users/lab/WebApplications/next_browse_app/public>
     AllowOverride all              
Allow from all   
    Options -MultiViews            
  </Directory>

Any help is very much appreciated! Thanks!

Phillip Whisenhunt
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1 Answers1

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Have done diagnostic on apache and passenger when things starts to crawl ?

Please try tools like

apachetop

or

wtop

wtop google code link

It should give you ideas what apache was doing realtime !

Passenger comes with nice tool which shows many memory related stuffs about rails server.

passenger-memory-stats

Since you mentioned you app is database intensive, have you checked if the database is the bottleneck !

Keep your eye on overall memory and CPU usage to get better ideas.

kaji
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  • Thanks for your input Kaji, I'll check these tools out to try and diagnose the problem. Also, I've noticed that a few of my httpd processes seem to run wild. Are they suppose to exceed 300 mb? Thanks! – Phillip Whisenhunt Feb 01 '12 at 15:06
  • yeah it could very well happen with apache in prefork mode – kaji Feb 02 '12 at 02:24