Rails - Jun 2005 - How to reload classes on a production server when you can't restart apache

Hi, I''m trying to get a rails app installed on DreamHost, running in
production mode.  Of course I don''t have root access, and I''m
wondering what the best way of reloading the fcgi processes is, so
that I can get it to see some modifications I''ve made to the source.

Thanks,
Carl

> Hi, I''m trying to get a rails app installed on DreamHost, running
in
> production mode.  Of course I don''t have root access, and
I''m
> wondering what the best way of reloading the fcgi processes is, so
> that I can get it to see some modifications I''ve made to the
source.

If fastcgi is configured with suexec, you own your dispatch.fcgi
process, which means you can kill it yourself, if you have shell
access.  (Apache will restart it for you)

Tyler

I think it is set up this way, because if I run top in the background
and reload my site I see a bunch of ruby processes changing.  I
presume these are the fastcgi processes, right?

On 6/24/05, Tyler Kiley
<tyler.kiley-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>
wrote:
> If fastcgi is configured with suexec, you own your dispatch.fcgi
> process, which means you can kill it yourself, if you have shell
> access.  (Apache will restart it for you)

I don''t know why and how, but Dreamhost told me their fcgi setup checks
for updates in the scripts somehow. And it works for me. However it 
takes some time for the changes to "propagate" - half an hour or so

I had some trouble installing fcgi.

Just in case:
 - make sure the public dir (and possibly all the dirs above it) are 
chmod''ed 755
 - make *sure* dispatch.fcgi has no windows newlines (I.e. only \n 
instead of \n\r or \r (mac) for that matter)

Sometimes my first request to my site takes about 10 seconds (!) or so, 
but after that it''s pretty quick. I''ll have to drop a line to
support,
they''re super helpful.

RMagick doesn''t work yet as they have to update their ImageMagick 
version. That sucks but they said they have that planned (to install 
it). More specifically: they want to install the new Debian version 
which has ImageMagick 6 included


Cheers,

Rob

On 25-jun-2005, at 2:06, Robert M wrote:
>
> Sometimes my first request to my site takes about 10 seconds (!) or  
> so, but after that it''s pretty quick. I''ll have to drop a
line to
> support, they''re super helpful.
Which (translated) means "your FCGI processes (or even apache)  are  
killed no matter what after some period of idling". As soon as the  
admins take this too far (have to deal with it now on my prod. box)  
your whole infrastructure is restarted every half an hour (until the  
site is bombarded with requests).

Which, well, sucks big bigbig  time (because the whole point of fcgi  
or mod_ruby is to NOT have to reload and restart everything).

OTOH I don''t know what I would do in place of the admins if I had to  
deal with something so fragile and dangerous (in terms of system  
clogging) as Rails. I will be ultra-careful choosing my next host  
though, and judging from your report DreamHost is off my list.

This is what I began to call "sort-of-supports-rails" type of hosting.

-- 
Julian "Julik" Tarkhanov

What Tyler mentions works great at DH. Just run top and kill any
fastcgi processes you see. As you get the last one, you''ll see a new
one spawn and you can quit and your changes will show up.

I''ve just moved an app into production and it is really settling down
and running pretty nicely.  It''s been running all day and I
haven''t
had an entry in fastcgi.crash.log. (Of course it isn''t being heavily
used, but some moderate access.)

DreamHost certainly isn''t a rails specialist, but it seems to be
working for me. I think that doing your main development there is
probably not a good idea, but I doubt it would be at any provider. I
was really mainly doing integration testing there.

I already had an account at DH so I can''t say if I''d have
chosen them
otherwise. They don''t seem to be clamping down on processes as I ran
top for a couple of hours today with many of the processes living the
whole time. Perhaps that will change as they get more rails apps
there.

If anyone''s interested, here''s the app:

http://clubrs.org

-Tom

-- 
Tom Wilcoxen
http://convergentarts.com
http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?twilcoxen