Periodic crash

Rails
1

I’ve got an RoR application that periodically refreshes its page with

in the section. This works beautifully for the most part, but about every 4 or 5 days, Rails will crash with the dump shown below. All components are up to date, and I'm running with lighttpd and fastCGI. Any thoughts? --Tom

TypeError (incompatible marshal file format (can’t be read)
format version 4.8 required; 47.117 given):
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/pstore.rb:353:in load' /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/pstore.rb:353:inload’
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/pstore.rb:306:in transaction' /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/cgi/session/pstore.rb:90:inupdate’
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/cgi/session/pstore.rb:97:in close' /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/cgi/session.rb:330:inclose’
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-1.13.3/lib/
action_controller/base.rb:1184:in
close_session' /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-1.13.3/lib/ action_controller/base.rb:1228:inprocess_cleanup_without_flash’
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-1.13.3/lib/
action_controller/flash.rb:146:in
process_cleanup_without_filters' /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-1.13.3/lib/ action_controller/filters.rb:662:inprocess_cleanup_without_session_management_support’
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-1.13.3/lib/
action_controller/session_management.rb:124:in
process_cleanup_without_components' /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-1.13.3/lib/ action_controller/components.rb:178:inprocess_cleanup’
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-1.13.3/lib/
action_controller/base.rb:435:in
process_without_filters' /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-1.13.3/lib/ action_controller/filters.rb:624:inprocess_without_session_management_support’
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-1.13.3/lib/
action_controller/session_management.rb:114:in
process' /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-1.13.3/lib/ action_controller/base.rb:330:inprocess’
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rails-1.2.3/lib/dispatcher.rb:41:in
dispatch' /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rails-1.2.3/lib/fcgi_handler.rb: 168:inprocess_request’
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rails-1.2.3/lib/fcgi_handler.rb:
143:in
process_each_request!' /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rails-1.2.3/lib/fcgi_handler.rb: 109:inwith_signal_handler’
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rails-1.2.3/lib/fcgi_handler.rb:
142:in
process_each_request!' /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/fcgi.rb:612:ineach_cgi’
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/fcgi.rb:609:in each_cgi' /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rails-1.2.3/lib/fcgi_handler.rb: 141:inprocess_each_request!’
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rails-1.2.3/lib/fcgi_handler.rb:
55:in
process!' /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rails-1.2.3/lib/fcgi_handler.rb: 25:inprocess!’
/home/homepage/public/dispatch.fcgi:24

2

my guess is you have an old session file that rails can’t read due to
it being an incompatible version (from the error message). you’re
going to have to take a look at your sessions and see which one is
causing the problem.

Off the top of my head, I would think that you had this app deployed
under an earlier version of rails, then upgraded. Some old session
files were still in place after the upgrade and now they are causing
the problems whenever the associated users view your site.

I could be way off base though.

3

That’s what I thought at first too, but it doesn’t seem to be the
case. Indeed, it will crash if I’m the only user. And everything is
freshly installed, not upgraded (rails 1.2.3, ruby 1.8.6, etc). And
it works fine
for a week or so and then crashes. I can up the frequency of that by
increasing the refresh rate so it seems to have something to do with
the number of updates, so I’m thinking a stack leak of some kind?

–Tom

4

Note also in the stack dump above, none of what is called is “my”
code. It’s all core stuff…