origin: gabito.com blog post

…I’ve finally gotten my 500 error rate down to 0 by making some minor changes to the signal handling code of dispatch.fcgi. If the dispatch.fcgi process is in the midst of handling a request I defer letting it be killed until the request is complete. I did this by installing a custom TERM signal handler that protects the dispatch.fcgi process while a request is being processed…

I put some notes for nginx on my wiki .

The rails system administration is like waves – somebody found a new software and the community just fulfill it. Maybe there must be some name for this effect. Something like digg-effect but maybe Rails wave hahaha.

First there was lighttpd , now nginx comming. Maybe your piece of code will be the next. Are your ready?

Great news from LiteSpeed Technologies – after a post to the forum they have “X-Forwarded-Proto: https” AUTOMATICALY added to the headers, when proxing requests, initially comming via HTTPS. Now Rails applications are not confused, when doing redirects for HTTPS. Good to be added to Litespeed+Mongrel docs .

The litespeed-2.1.17 is already available for download (even still there is no announce).

1. Install fossilize plugin

$ ./script/plugin source http://opensvn.csie.org/mmediasys/trunk/rails/plugins/
$ ./script/plugin install fossilize

2. Create the default script and configuration for your application

# will create config/application.yml and bin/my_rails_app
$ ./script/generate fossilize MyRailsApp

3. Edit config/application.yml if needed (author name, email, gem version etc.)

4. Generate the gem (in pkg/ directory)

# will produce pkg/my_rails_app-x.y.z.gem
$ rake package

5. Usage

$ gem install my_rails_app
$ my_rails_app /path/to/install

Must read articles for everybody, doing RoR systems administration:

• The adventures of scaling, Stage 1
• Questions and answers for Stage 1
• The adventures of scaling, Stage 2
• The adventures of scaling, Stage 3

03-Apr-2006 Update:

• The adventures of scaling, Stage 4

A relatively unknown webserver from LiteSpeed Technologies claims to be six times faster than Apache with a PHP interface that is 50% faster than mod_php…Litespeed webserver is available in 3 editions, the standard edition being free (for both personal and commercial use).

And it can launch RoR applications .
Maybe not so hot news, because we already have quick fastcgi capable web server like lighttpd . Still some alternative is good.

From the Lighttpd blog
:

lighttpd 1.4.8 was just released and next to a pile of bugfixes we added a new option to fastcgi.server to allow a simple setup of multiple rails app in one virtual host…the new option strip-request-uri removes parts of the request-uri before they are sent to the backend:

$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/app1/" {
  server.document-root = "/home/rails/app1/public/"
  alias.url = ( "/app1/" => "/home/rails/app1/public/" )
  server.error-handler-404 = "/app1/dispatch.fcgi"
  fastcgi.server = ( "/app1/dispatch.fcgi" =>
    (( "socket" => "/tmp/app1.socket1",
       "bin-path" =>  "/home/rails/app1/public/dispatch.fcgi",
       "strip-request-uri" => "/app1/"
  )))
}

Maybe you can have the same effect with adding to config/environment.rb the line:

ActionController::AbstractRequest.relative_url_root = "/app1"

In case of lighttpd, runing on high port, behign an apache proxy (similar to TextDrive), just add to apache.conf:

ProxyPass /app1 http://app1.example.net:8080
ProxyPassReverse /app1 http://app1.example.net:8080

Distributing Rails Applications
– Tar2RubyScript and RubyScript2Exe tutorial