Hello all. Time for an all night installation campfire (no pun intended) story. I just helped a customer migrate from a single box to a 5 box system. 2 Lighty 2 FCGI 1 DB Everything went quite well. I scripted everything so it would be easy to add more boxes in the future. 3 scripts, one for each box type above. Then came time to get the site working. :-) Lighty came up easily. The DB came up easily. Connectivity to the FCGI boxes to the DB was demonstrated early and the champagne was nearly flowing. But we *could not* get the spinner/spawner to launch dispatch.fcgi processes. running dispatch.fcgi let us sort out a number of problems, all trivial. Each time we were sure that the processes would appear, and we''d be able to sleep...but it just didn''t happen. Google served hundreds of requests. IRQ was visited to no avail. I was always sure that nobody was reading the list at a late hour. Certainly my lack of sleep made it easier for me to forget that the net is a big place, and the planet even larger, and it''s always daytime somewhere. :-) Finally, finally, I realized that I could run the spinner/spawner combination without the -d (daemon) option provided in the SwitchTower docs. And, after much angst, there was the answer! In order to spawn an fcgi process, a machine must have a binary installed by Lighttpd, fcgi-spawner. The machine providing the FCGI processes is not running Lighty, but the requirement is still there. So, in the future, if you''re setting up FCGI and having difficulties, remember this post! I wonder if I have single-handedly figured out why a lot of people have difficulty with Apache and IIS? It seems to me, in my sleep deprived state, that without Lighty, Rails with FCGI cannot work. Perhaps this is only true if you''re using spinner/spawner to manage the FCGI processes? -- -- Tom Mornini
What a great story Tom ! Thank you for sharing :) On 3/2/06, Tom Mornini <tmornini@infomania.com> wrote:> > Hello all. Time for an all night installation > campfire (no pun intended) story. > > I just helped a customer migrate from a single box > to a 5 box system. > > 2 Lighty > 2 FCGI > 1 DB > > Everything went quite well. I scripted everything > so it would be easy to add more boxes in the future. > 3 scripts, one for each box type above. > > Then came time to get the site working. :-) > > Lighty came up easily. > The DB came up easily. > > Connectivity to the FCGI boxes to the DB was > demonstrated early and the champagne was nearly > flowing. > > But we *could not* get the spinner/spawner to > launch dispatch.fcgi processes. > > running dispatch.fcgi let us sort out a number > of problems, all trivial. Each time we were sure > that the processes would appear, and we''d be > able to sleep...but it just didn''t happen. > > Google served hundreds of requests. IRQ was > visited to no avail. I was always sure that > nobody was reading the list at a late hour. > Certainly my lack of sleep made it easier > for me to forget that the net is a big place, > and the planet even larger, and it''s always > daytime somewhere. :-) > > Finally, finally, I realized that I could run > the spinner/spawner combination without the > -d (daemon) option provided in the SwitchTower > docs. > > And, after much angst, there was the answer! > > In order to spawn an fcgi process, a machine > must have a binary installed by Lighttpd, > fcgi-spawner. The machine providing the FCGI > processes is not running Lighty, but the > requirement is still there. > > So, in the future, if you''re setting up FCGI > and having difficulties, remember this post! > > I wonder if I have single-handedly figured > out why a lot of people have difficulty with > Apache and IIS? It seems to me, in my sleep > deprived state, that without Lighty, Rails > with FCGI cannot work. > > Perhaps this is only true if you''re using > spinner/spawner to manage the FCGI processes? > > -- > -- Tom Mornini > > _______________________________________________ > Rails mailing list > Rails@lists.rubyonrails.org > http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails >-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wrath.rubyonrails.org/pipermail/rails/attachments/20060302/d30c2456/attachment.html
> On 3/2/06, Tom Mornini <tmornini@infomania.com > wrote: > > In order to spawn an fcgi process, a machine > > must have a binary installed by Lighttpd, > > fcgi-spawner. The machine providing the FCGI > > processes is not running Lighty, but the > > requirement is still there.You can use cgi-fcgi from libfcgi , so no need to install lighty. spinner/spawner will not work, but you can use runit [ http://www.smarden.org/runit/ ] for supervising. Something like: ---------------------- >8 --------------------- #!/bin/sh exec chpst -e ./env cgi-fcgi -start -supervise -connect {ip_addr}:{port} /path/to/dispatch.fcgi ---------------------- >8 --------------------- This will start the fcgi listener on {ip_addr}:{port}.