CustodyPlanner.com [beta]

Mar

15

99 Problems and Mongrel is one

posted by rob

Ok.  Before I start off on a rant, a little background about the site is in order.  CustodyPlanner.com is written in Ruby with the Rails framework.  All coding and graphic elements were done by me.  I'm to blame for the programmer art.  Alright, on with the rant.

When I first started developing the site, it ran on webrick.  No big deal.  I'm sure lots of developers use that for initial work.  I even used it for a little bit when it was just me and the ex using the site, but I knew that it needed to be on a more mature platform.  So, having worked with linux and the LAMP stack forever, my first inclination was to fire up apache, but the fastcgi setup was kinda weird.  I searching online for configuration hints and I stumbled across Lighttpd.  Lighttpd with rails seemed pretty straightforward and I ran the site like that for the first year or so.

Last fall, I got a job with an insurance marketing firm.  I learn a lot sometimes going in behind other developers.  The guy before me was really big on mongrel.  I had heard of mongrel before, but had resisted change.  Long story short: I converted.  I moved the site over to using a cluster of four mongrel processes with apache acting as a proxy front end.  After a while, I started to see at least one of the mongrel processes die.  I would get the old 500 response code and messages about a broken pipe.  A little research on teh internets had me tinkering with timeouts, but to no avail.

I was about to give up and go back to lighttpd, when I stumbled across Thin.  Thin uses the mongrel parsing engine, but seems to be a lot more stable.  The site has been on thin for about a week with no ill effects.  I guess we'll see.

Thin can be found here.

 

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