$ cat /home/buntine/mind_melting_brilliance

After pushing a large Rails app live recently, I was constantly struggling to keep Passenger live. Roughly, every 24 hours passenger would simply hang and stop handling requests. The machine (VPS running CentOS 5, 2gb RAM, 4 CPUs) had sufficient free resources and memory. Restarting Apache would instantly fix the issue and flush a bunch of "Broken pipe" errors to the error logs.

I found that killing the passenger process with a SIGABRT signal (6) would cause the process to write a stacktrace to Apaches error log. This was mildly useful.

As it turns out, I was able to solve the problem by finding and killing a couple of mysteriously dormant Ruby processes that passenger had left running. Why these were still running I am not sure. The Passenger team claim that the issue will be fixed in Passenger 3, but in the mean time, keeping an eye on Ruby processes may be beneficial. My (moderately heavy traffic) app has been online for about 7 days without a hitch now. Hopefully it will stay up indefinately now.

It's also worthwhile to make sure Apaches MaxClients setting is at an appropriate level (max_clients * average_process_size). My Passenger seemed to hang up as soon as this was hit. Be careful, though, as it turns out that Apache will keep spawning new clients even if you are out of memory -- I found this out the hard way.

Here are some useful discussions: http://code.google.com/p/phusion-passenger/issues/detail?id=318 and http://code.google.com/p/phusion-passenger/issues/detail?id=199.

I've been collecting Czech heavy metal LPs for several years now. There are just a few titles that I am missing. Some of these are so rare that only a few people even know they exist. The Sax Pijak is not so rare, but I still haven't got it yet.

I've seen some of them in photos and others I have been told exist from Czech nationals. The only one I have never actually seen is the Merlin "Nevada" LP. If anything has one of these, please let me know!

• Sifon - 100 høíchù LP (self, 1991) - FOUND 01/06/10
• TÖRR - Kladivo na čarodějnice LP (Monitor, 1993)
• Alkehol - Alkehol LP (Monitor, 1992)  - FOUND 20/05/10
• Alkehol - S úsmìvem se pije líp LP (Monitor, 1993) - FOUND 13/08/10
• Arakain - Schizofrenie EP (NOT LP) (Suprahpon, 1991)
• Alien - Kino noc a kino den/Cesta všech EP (Best I.A, 1992)
• Distorze - Distorze / Zrcadlo (Best I.A, 1990)
• Distorze - Fuck of War EP (Private, 1991)
• Toxic Trash - Same LP (Pring/Private, 1992)
• Tarantula - Peklo pro všechny LP (Tony records, 1992) - FOUND 31/08/10
• Merlin - Nevada LP (Monitor, 1991) - FOUND 17/08/10
• Sebastian - Sny o Marii LP (Monitor, 1991) - FOUND 05/07/10
• Mac Beth - Mac Beth LP (Best I.A, 1992) - FOUND 02/09/10
• Sax Piják - Válka nervù LP (Sacred records, 1992) - FOUND 01/08/10
• Kabát - Děvky ty to znaj LP (Monitor, 1993) - FOUND 09/08/10
• Pathologist - Putrefactive and Cadaverous Odes About Necroticism LP (M.A.B, 1993)
• Apolon - TVÁR SEBCA / ČACHTICKÁ PANI EP (Zeras, 1992)
• Citron - Radegast LP (ZYX Metal, 1989)
• Corona - Naivka/Muzu ti lhat EP (Private/P&R, 1993)
• Calibos - Calibos LP (Globus Intl., 1992)