Mongrel users - Apr 2006 - Mongrel Web Server 0.3.12.3 -- Thread Tracking and Debugging

Hello Everyone,

Mongrel is getting closer and closer to being a rock solid release.  My goal
is to release 0.4 as "production ready" by Canada on Rails.  Please
report
any problems or suggestions you have.  There won''t be any major
features or
improvements just fixes and code reviews to repair any found bugs or
security concerns.

People interested in Mongrel should look at http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/
and remember, you can report bugs by clicking on the two yellow beetles.
You don''t have to join the mailing list as I actively check that bug
posting
system.

You can get Mongrel using:  gem install mongrel


CONTENT_TYPE FIX

If you had garbage file uploads than this release is for you.  This release
has a small fix for a big problem where people uploading files or using
multipart forms would not receive the CONTENT_TYPE and get garbage in their
request parameters.

Turned out to be a four character fix.  I hate that.


THREAD DEBUGGING

This release also adds a few things to help people debug their use of
threads within their Ruby on Rails applications.  When you run mongrel_rails
with the -B (debugging) option Mongrel will report all active threads
between each request to log/mongrel_debug/thread.log.  If you see reports of
Mongrel being overloaded, threads getting killed, or having to wait for
Mongrel to shutdown then turn on debugging (-B) and look in this log. You
most likely are doing something that keeps the thread from exiting.

Mongrel also deals with dead threads much better.  First the graceful
shutdown will wait 10 seconds for a request to finish before aborting it
during the shutdown process.  Second it will find processing threads which
have taken longer than 60+timeout seconds and kill them.  Finally, you can
put a value into your own Thread.current and when you use the thread.log you
can figure out which controllers and actions are creating the bad threads.

For example, lets say you see a thread leak.  Many times this is caused by
trying to make a connection to a remote resource that isn''t there, but
you''re not sure.  What you do is put this into the suspected
controller''s
action:

 Thread.current[:bad_controller_action] = true

Or some of other tag to differentiate it with the other threads.  Then run
Mongrel with -B and if you see this in the KEYS list then you know that this
is the controller. 


MYSQL DROPPED CONNECTIONS? ANYONE?

Finally, there seems to be a bug in Rails where it is constantly dropping
the connection to MySQL.  I''ve found this error on nearly everything
and
it''s worse when you run WEBrick.  It seems to get a little better when
you
set *ActionController::Base.allow_concurrency* in your config/environments
the problem is lessened especially if you run Mongrel, which I don''t
understand at all.

I''m still trying to determine the cause of this, but if you see this
problem
please report it to me with what system you are running and how often you
see it.

**Remember, this is a Rails problem not a Mongrel problem since I see it
with WEBrick, FastCGI, SCGI, and on Win32, FreeBSD, OSX, and Linux.**


Zed A. Shaw
http://www.zedshaw.com/
http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/

> 
> MYSQL DROPPED CONNECTIONS? ANYONE?
> 
Aye.. I had that with SCGI running a vanilla Typo 2.6.0. It seemed to 
happen over night, and my guess was an 8 hour time out or similar from 
MySQL. I didn''t dig for the root cause, I set up a cron job to call my 
app every 10 minute and it hasn''t happened since.

I was going to do a similar setup with Mongrel, but when I try to 
install it on the server I get:

...
  28. mongrel 0.2.1 (ruby)
  29. mongrel 0.2.0 (ruby)
  30. Cancel installation
 > 1
Install required dependency daemons? [Yn]  Y
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (ArgumentError)
     parse error on line 0, col 31: `!ruby/object:Gem::Specification ''

Anyone know what this may be?

Thanks.

Morten

> 
> MYSQL DROPPED CONNECTIONS? ANYONE?
+ 1

I have many of "Mysql::Error: Lost connection to MySQL server during 
query" exceptions in my logs...

Jonathan



-- 
Jonathan Weiss
http://blog.innerewut.de

Morten,

I got the same error.  It took me awhile to figure out that I was 
running Ruby 1.8.2 and needed to upgrade to 1.8.4.  There is a "Release 
Candidate 1" on RubyForge that works great (assuming you''re also
on
Windows).

-Jeff

Morten wrote:
>>MYSQL DROPPED CONNECTIONS? ANYONE?
>>
>>    
>>
>
>Aye.. I had that with SCGI running a vanilla Typo 2.6.0. It seemed to 
>happen over night, and my guess was an 8 hour time out or similar from 
>MySQL. I didn''t dig for the root cause, I set up a cron job to call
my
>app every 10 minute and it hasn''t happened since.
>
>I was going to do a similar setup with Mongrel, but when I try to 
>install it on the server I get:
>
>...
>  28. mongrel 0.2.1 (ruby)
>  29. mongrel 0.2.0 (ruby)
>  30. Cancel installation
> > 1
>Install required dependency daemons? [Yn]  Y
>ERROR:  While executing gem ... (ArgumentError)
>     parse error on line 0, col 31: `!ruby/object:Gem::Specification
''
>
>Anyone know what this may be?
>
>Thanks.
>
>Morten
>
>
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Mongrel-users mailing list
>Mongrel-users at rubyforge.org
>http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/mongrel-users
>  
>

Jeff Casimir wrote:
> Morten,
> 
> I got the same error.  It took me awhile to figure out that I was 
> running Ruby 1.8.2 and needed to upgrade to 1.8.4.  There is a
"Release
> Candidate 1" on RubyForge that works great (assuming you''re
also on
> Windows).
I''m on Linux, but it was indeed the Ruby version. Upgraded and works 
nicely! Thanks Jeff :-)