awkward silence

If you’re using fastcgi, either here at DreamHost or elsewhere, you may need to restart the processes from time to time.

You may have an app in Production mode and need to flush the fastcgi processes so a change will show up, or if you have something in development mode and have a bunch of dead and dying processes.

Generally if I see more than a handful of processes or if I see any ‘zombie’ processes, I’ll restart the fastcgis to reset things.

killall -9 dispatch.fcgi

This will get the whole bunch of them at once.

I found this most interesting in light of the recent spat over responsible deployment. It looks like the Java folks (and I count myself among them) are hankering for a bite of the dynamic deployment pie.

Read through the use case. It is very compelling — a user gets an error in a popup with a Mail button, sends it off, developers make a fix and check it in to subversion, the user refreshes the page and the error is gone. From a Java developer’s point of view that reads like science fiction.

This sounds strangely like the process used by 37signals , “release manager,” which will be released soon.

Hey, if it works, we can all get on board. Deployment in Java could certainly use some agility. I’ll be curious to see how it goes. Unfortunately this is just a proposal for an ‘incubator’ project at apache.org, which means it’ll likely be years before it will see light of day, if it does at all.

I wonder how long till we see the Rails release manager?