> I've had a right fun few days at work trying to figure out why our Rails > app (which isn't under very heavy load) kept eating memory and bringing > our server to our knees. Eventually I traced it to send_file (which was > in a way a relief as it wasn't down to my coding ;) -- every time a user > started downloading, the memory consumed by the app would jump, and > wouldn't go down again, even when they had cancelled the download (I > haven't tested whether the memory would still be consumed after they > completed the download). This has become apparent recently as the app > has been used for larger files (150MB and upwards). As a fix I've > delegated file serving to lighttpd + mod_sec_download, not quite as > convenient but probably better in the long run anyway. > > So the problem is solved, but I was just wondering why this happened in > the first place; according to the Rails docs, send_file buffers the > response in order to not tie up memory. However, this was clearly not > happening -- is this possibly related to how Mongrel interacts with > Rails? If so, I gave it a try under lighttpd and still had the problem, > any idea why? I'm really just looking to understand the issue better as > I hate to walk away from a problem without fully comprehending it :)
You don't say it, but are you using the sendfile gem? There was a lot of talk about there being serious problems with the sendfile gem on various platforms to the point that Zed explicitly told people to stop using it.... Just a thought. _______________________________________________ Mongrel-users mailing list Mongrel-users@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/mongrel-users
