awkward silence

As clubrs.org has just reached it’s first release, I’ve noticed that I have a lot fewer fastcgi related issues. I think fastcgi is very sensitive and will tend to crash where you wouldn’t expect it.

For example, I had an issue with concatenating a String and a Fixnum. This barely showed up in the log under webrick but killed fastcgi. As I got things more stable and switched to production mode, the app is running much more smoothly.

http://clubrs.org

Since we have ssh access at DreamHost, I just watch top for a while to get a feeling for how things are going. If I only see a couple of dispatch.fcgi processes things are good. More than that and I can figure it isn’t running too well.

I don’t know if this is the best way to do it, but it works (you’ll need shell access). If you make changes to an object in a production environment, you can flush them through by killing off the fastcgi processes. When the new ones are spawned they’ll pick up the changed objects.

kill PID -9

To see them, I use top, and you can actually kill them off from in there by typing ‘k’. It will prompt you for the PID and signal to send.