Paul Goscicki

To anyone interested, here’s the link to my github repository with all of my open-source projects. Most of them are my own Rails plugins, but I host the latest development version of the WP Movie Ratings plugin. Without any further ado, here it is:

http://github.com/pjg

Great movie and a great quote (or rather a monologue):

Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make. You can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won’t know for 20 years and you may never, ever trace it to its source.

And you only get one chance to play it out. And they say there is no fate, but there is, it’s what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and eons you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second.

Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain wasting years for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes, or it seems to, but it doesn’t really. So you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along.

Something to make you feel connected.
Something to make you feel whole.
Something to make you feel loved.

And the truth is I feel so angry.
And the truth is I feel so fucking sad.
And the truth is, I’ve felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long.
And for just as long, I’ve been pretending I’m okay just to get along, just for…

I don’t know why. Maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery because they have their own. Well, fuck everybody.

- Amen.

The scenario goes more or less like this. You have your Virtuozzo powered VPS. You have your RAM limit. You have your mongrels behind nginx plus mysql taking on average 60-70% of your available RAM (quite sensible limit). Now imagine the server gets hammered (not necessairly your VPS). Load goes over 10 (or even over 50). Mongrels stop responding. Queue builds up (inside mongrels), mongrels consume more and more of memory. Load still over 10. Memory limit reached. One of the mongrels is killed by Virtuozzo (too bad if it was the only one). Load still high. At some point other mongrels stop accepting new requests (queue limit reached?) and when load goes down they are unable to process the built up queue. Effect: your website is returning a 500 error code and you have to manually restart the mongrels (they are hanged up). I’ve been seeing similar behaviour too often lately…

Possible solutions: xen (does not kill your children), passenger (spawns new children whenever needed), haproxy (prolongs the life of your children), god (brings dead children back to life).

I’m going with passenger for now, thinking about moving to xen in the future.