Rails on mod_rails aka Passenger Phusion on DreamHost PS 2
So, when moving my DH account over to their VPS-ish offering, I decided to stick with fcgi for a while to see how it did under less memory constrained circumstances. My blog stayed up way better, but memory usage definitely climbed consistently, and the server needed restarting every week or two. Killing off the ruby’s and the fcgi’s didn’t seem to be enough, for some reason.
So, with that as a baseline, I switched over to mod_rails. It started with an immediate jump up in memory, which had me slightly worried. And, it was a little spikier on memory usage. But, it is steady and consistent. I haven’t had to restart the module, much less my server, since I switched. It seems to be spikier (and in retrospect, they are pretty small spikes), because it actually grabs and releases memory as it needs it, unlike FCGI, which just seemed to slowly leak memory away to some hidden land where the mallocs play.
One side-note, if you are using rewrites for things like redirecting your rss to feedburner, you may need to adjust them, as the switch can mess with that. I haven’t fixed mine yet, and briefly wondered why my feedburner stats fell way off.
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Good news to hear. I still haven’t tried it, but I’ve about that first jump in memory. So you don’t need to do any web/app server restarting when deploying?
Well, I kicked my server over once, while switching it over, because that was only sensible, and I wanted whatever remnants of memory I could get back from the soul-sucking succubus of Apache FCGI. I mean, I’d be restarting it around then anyways, if I were still on FCGI, so I just gave it that final boot, and haven’t touched it since.