CROWDCTRL

Running four decent sized Ruby on Rails applications – Northtemple, Lynesfam (careful, having some long loadtimes from Flickr over there), Crowd, and a few experimental ideas – on Dreamhost isn’t such a good idea, I found recently.

Crowd was ok due to some handy caching, but Northtemple’s caching wasn’t working quite right and it was going down for hours a day with 500 Server Errors. A few emails to support led to identifying the problem as memory overload on my stupid shared account. Seems I had too many FCGI’s going around, and Dreamhost wasn’t playing nice with ‘em. I’m not a huge fan of Apache 1.3, and combined with FCGI it was downright horrible, not to mention embarassing.

You can only tout the benefits of Rails so much with your sites crashing all the time before the PHP heads start ignoring you and turning attentions back to the oh so wonderful PHP manuals.

So Tadd stumbles upon a nice suggestion for a solution. John Nunemaker over at Addicted to New posted a great fix for these Dreamhost Rails FCGI woes:

Run each app with its own shell username, and that keeps the apps from taking up eachother’s memory and it won’t time out.

At least it hasn’t yet. Now each app has it’s own username, which is a bit of a pain because you can only edit one user’s files at a time on the server, but now I’ve got the apps all suited up correctly in Capistrano and so I rarely ever have to log in anyway. Rad. Let’s hope this keeps it up. Otherwise, on to Amazon’s S3.