[Mongrel] Anyway to dynamically start/stop mongrel based on web traffic?
Hey all - I've got a question that I haven't seen addressed anywhere and was wondering if anyone has put any thought into it or not... Here's my setup... I have several *small* sites running apache/mongrel. Each has a single mongrel instance. Most don't get any traffic (no one reads my blog :). And I was thinking, I could host a couple of more sites/projects without worrying about ram if I could find a way have all my mongrels be off until a request came in... then apache (or some other server) could block until it could get mongrel started, then keep processing the request. Then I could either kill off the mongrel later if no traffic was coming in. Or perhaps mongrel itself could stay running, but unload (and free the ram) of rails until a request came in, then load it back up for awhile until traffic stopped and unload it... So.. I guess I'm wondering if anyone's done anything like this or if it is possible and if so what the best way to go about it might be? I'd be willing to help (if I can, but not sure how likely that is :) It would be nice to have my little apps that get little traffic not suck up so much ram while idle.. -philip ___ Mongrel-users mailing list Mongrel-users@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/mongrel-users
Re: [Mongrel] Anyway to dynamically start/stop mongrel based on web traffic?
Philip Hallstrom wrote: Then I could either kill off the mongrel later if no traffic was coming in. Or perhaps mongrel itself could stay running, but unload (and free the ram) of rails until a request came in, then load it back up for awhile until traffic stopped and unload it... What you're talking about is inetd functionality for a rails process. If you're on a sane unix, you could probably make that happen. Take a look at /etc/inetd.conf, or your version thereof. Whether it is a good idea or not, well, that's another matter. I'm inclined to say not. :-) -- GPG/PGP key ID: 0x3A410DBD | http://pgp.mit.edu 7B3F 4505 7D9A 7FDE 83C9 52C2 4909 59B9 3A41 0DBD ___ Mongrel-users mailing list Mongrel-users@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/mongrel-users
Re: [Mongrel] Anyway to dynamically start/stop mongrel based on web traffic?
Philip Hallstrom wrote: Then I could either kill off the mongrel later if no traffic was coming in. Or perhaps mongrel itself could stay running, but unload (and free the ram) of rails until a request came in, then load it back up for awhile until traffic stopped and unload it... What you're talking about is inetd functionality for a rails process. If you're on a sane unix, you could probably make that happen. Take a look at /etc/inetd.conf, or your version thereof. Kind of... my understanding of inetd though is that it listens on the port, accepts the connection, spawns the process and the process talks via stdin/out till done, then exits. What I want is a front-end webserver that realizes mongrel isn't running, holds the connection while it starts it, then continues as normal. I can kill the mongrel off later somehow... Basically I want dynamically spawned FCGI processes, but I've used FCGI before which is why I'm now using mongrel :) An ugly brute force would be to simply watch apache's logs for a 503 error and if seen start up mongrel, but that means one user is gonna get a broken page... I don't know enough about mongrel/rails/ruby to know if mongrel can unload the majority of that 30mb it's using, but still keep on listening, but if someone (Zed? :) wanted to give me some pointers I'd love to give it a try :) -philip ___ Mongrel-users mailing list Mongrel-users@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/mongrel-users
