Rails app + Apache Passenger + Postgres : memory consumption

Rails
1

Hi all,

I’ve a Rails 3.0 application that have a problem with the memory
consumption.

The application works in production mode on Apache + passenger mod on a
Debian machine. It’s a virtual machine with 6 Gb RAM and 2 CPU (1 core
3GHz). It’s a mailing application and a simple click on a link to read a
mail requires a series of operations on the server to render the page.
This simple click needs about 50% of CPU during 2 or 3 seconds (I see it
with “top” command). It seems that ruby processes allocate memory for
jobs. But when the job is finished, the allocated memory seems to not be
freed (unlike the CPU usage).

The problem is that I’ve about 150 users on the system and the
Postgresql database is installed on the same machine. When several users
make operations at same time, memory usage increases until 100% and
Postgres can’t accept request any more (then Postgres stops to log).

Is there any configuration that I can make (Apache? Passenger? Rails?)
to prevent memory usage increasing (Why it isn’t decreasing with the
CPU?) and Postgresql crash?

Thank you in advance.

Rémi

2

Is there any configuration that I can make (Apache? Passenger? Rails?)
to prevent memory usage increasing (Why it isn’t decreasing with the
CPU?) and Postgresql crash?

What version of ruby are you using? If possible, you may want to
consider
using http://www.rubyenterpriseedition.com.

There are Passenger configuration variables you can use to adjust how
long
processes stay alive to continue serving requests, how many requests
they
serve, the max number of processes, etc.

http://www.modrails.com/documentation/Users%20guide%20Apache.html#_resource_control_and_optimization_options

Also, you can check the status and memory usage of your Passenger/Rails
processes using the commands documented here:

http://www.modrails.com/documentation/Users%20guide%20Apache.html#_analysis_and_system_maintenance

Jim

3

Thank you for your answer.

What version of ruby are you using? If possible, you may want to
consider
using http://www.rubyenterpriseedition.com.

I use Ruby 1.8.7 . I will inquire about Ruby Enterprise Edition.

There are Passenger configuration variables you can use to adjust how
long
processes stay alive to continue serving requests, how many requests
they
serve, the max number of processes, etc.

http://www.modrails.com/documentation/Users%20guide%20Apache.html#_resource_control_and_optimization_options

This is my actual Passenger config :

StartServers 4 MinSpareThreads 25 MaxSpareThreads 100 ThreadLimit 64 ThreadsPerChild 25 MaxClients 300 MaxRequestsPerChild 900