Rory Hansen

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If you’ve been hosting your app with Textdrive using Apache and FastCGI, you may have noticed that FastCGI seems to crash every few minutes with these kinds of error messages:

[Mon Aug 08 03:40:25 GMT 2005] Dispatcher failed to catch: SIGHUP (SignalException)
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/fcgi.rb:597:in `each’
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/fcgi.rb:597:in `each_cgi’
dispatch.fcgi:18
FCGI process 28217 killed by this error

[Mon Aug 08 04:07:55 GMT 2005] Dispatcher failed to catch: exit (SystemExit)
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/fcgi.rb:10:in `exit’
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/fcgi.rb:10
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/fcgi.rb:10:in `call’
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/fcgi.rb:597:in `each’
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/fcgi.rb:597:in `each_cgi’
dispatch.fcgi:18
FCGI process 38625 killed by this error

These crashes really don’t have _that_ much of an effect on your website, except that the next visitor to your website will have to wait a few seconds before anything appears while the web server caches some information. But my Ruby on Rails website gets quite a bit of traffic, so this happens to visitors every 5 minutes throughout the day.

So, I decided to move to Lighttpd from Apache, which should stop these types of errors from occuring.

The Lighttpd setup was extremely painless and I had everything setup within 30 minutes. The first step is to send a ticket to the support staff at Textdrive, requesting them to setup a Lighttpd port for you. In the reply from the Textdrive support staff, they’ll reference a couple great webpages that contain Lighttpd tutorials to follow. Specifically I followed these tutorials:

• http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/show/DeployingApplicationOnTextdrive
• http://jlaine.net/blog/48/running-your-own-lighttpd-on-textdrive-and-keeping-it-alive-too-part-i

On the Deploying Application On Textdrive wiki page, skip halfway down the page and check out the section called Lighttpd For Idiots. This is a great tutorial that will get you nearly complete. (I did find one small problem with this tutorial though. When I ran the lighttpd command over SSH to start up the Lighttpd server, I got an error message saying that my lyricsdb.socket file didn’t exist. To fix this problem, just create a tmp/ folder in the lighttpd/ folder.

On you’ve completed this tutorial, head to the 2nd webpage that I linked to above. The 2nd link shows you how to set up a cron job so that your Lighttpd server starts every time the webserver is restarted.

Now, my Ruby on Rails website is being served by Lighttpd. I just hope that I didn’t miss anything, considering that my app was initially running over Apache and FastCGI. Do I need to turn anything off that I may have turned on to get Apache and FastCGI going in the first place?