It all started with a POST request to send those emails:

app[web.10]: Started POST ...

Which timed out and there was no:

app[web.10]: Completed 200 OK ...

or similar log entry later on, just silence.

This is Heroku’s killing machine in action. It silently kills every process, which runs for longer than 30 seconds (we’re using the Bamboo stack). This is more or less how Heroku deals with long running requests. I don’t blame them for this behavior, even though I very much dislike it. But I digress.

When Heroku kills such process it does so in a very nice way, i.e. it lets it finish its business first. In other words the process will continue in the background and after finishing it will just die/stop/restart. Our email collecting job (selecting 150K users from the database…) run uninterrupted for over 40 minutes. So this is the good part.

The bad part is that when this killed process is still running in the background the dyno which it was connected to will stop serving new requests until this process finally dies, but Heroku will keep sending new requests to it! This is observed by the infamous H12 timeouts:

heroku[router]: Error H12 (Request timeout) -> GET auth.exvo.com/users/sign_in dyno=web.10 queue= wait= service=30000ms status=503 bytes=0

Also notice the 503 error code (Unavailable), which is returned by the Heroku router.

So this is really bad as all sorts of different/random web requests will just keep failing without you knowing what’s going on.

So while I greatly appreciate that Heroku lets such processes still run in the background, I really don’t like that it still keeps sending traffic their way.

PS: Yes, sending emails should be done as a background action by the Heroku workers. I know. But it’s not. Yet.

Nothing else here, move along.

Compiling yaml in /home/ubuntu/.rvm/src/yaml-0.1.4.
ERROR: Error running 'make ', please read /home/ubuntu/.rvm/log/ruby-1.9.2-p290/yaml/make.log
Installing yaml to /home/ubuntu/.rvm/usr
ERROR: Error running 'make install', please read /home/ubuntu/.rvm/log/ruby-1.9.2-p290/yaml/make.install.log

and in the log:

src/Makefile.am:2: Libtool library used but `LIBTOOL' is undefined
src/Makefile.am:2:   The usual way to define `LIBTOOL' is to add `AC_PROG_LIBTOOL'
src/Makefile.am:2:   to `configure.ac' and run `aclocal' and `autoconf' again.
src/Makefile.am:2:   If `AC_PROG_LIBTOOL' is in `configure.ac', make sure
src/Makefile.am:2:   its definition is in aclocal's search path.

Fortunately the solution was rather simple, although Google was not really that helpful this time, hence this post:

sudo aptitude install libtool

Basically the libtool library was not installed.

Improper/misleading:

true or true ? "yes" : "no"
=> true

the above is basically the same as this:

true or (true ? "yes" : "no")
=> true

The proper way:

true || true ? "yes" : "no"
=> "yes"

require "bundler/capistrano"
set :bundle_dir,     ""         # install into "system" gems
set :bundle_flags,   "--quiet"  # no verbose output
set :bundle_without, []         # bundle all gems (even dev & test)

Maybe someone finds it helpful.

$ rvm upgrade ruby-1.9.2-p180 ruby-1.9.2-p290

First annoyance – moving gems from one gemset to the new one took over 40 minutes. Have really no idea why.

But after it was done, whenever I tried to run ‘gem’ or ‘rake’ or ‘bundle’ I got:

Invalid gemspec in [/home/jkl/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/specifications/guard-0.8.1.gemspec]: invalid date format in specification: "2011-09-29
00:00:00.000000000Z"
Invalid gemspec in [/home/jkl/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/specifications/json-1.6.1.gemspec]: invalid date format in specification: "2011-09-18 0
0:00:00.000000000Z"
Invalid gemspec in [/home/jkl/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/specifications/heroku-2.8.4.gemspec]: invalid date format in specification: "2011-09-23
 00:00:00.000000000Z"
Invalid gemspec in [/home/jkl/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/specifications/guard-0.8.4.gemspec]: invalid date format in specification: "2011-10-03
00:00:00.000000000Z"
Invalid gemspec in [/home/jkl/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/specifications/multi_xml-0.4.0.gemspec]: invalid date format in specification: "2011-09
-06 00:00:00.000000000Z"
Invalid gemspec in [/home/jkl/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/specifications/heroku-2.8.1.gemspec]: invalid date format in specification: "2011-09-21
 00:00:00.000000000Z"
Invalid gemspec in [/home/jkl/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/specifications/metrical-0.0.7.gemspec]: invalid date format in specification: "2011-09-
11 00:00:00.000000000Z"
...
and so on...

The above is another manifestation of the YAML engine switch from Syck to Psych and all of the incompatibilities it has brought. The problem is that now you have to reinstall all of your gems, because all installed gems have wrong gemspec specification. D’oh.

I fixed it by running:

$ rvm gemset empty

And then bundling in each project…

$ bundle

Some more reading material.

Silent error in Ruby 1.8.7:

x = [:a, :b]
=> [:a, :b]

x.slice!(:a)
=> nil

x
=> [:a, :b]

Explicit error (resulting in a failing test) in Ruby 1.9.2:

x = [:a, :b]
=> [:a, :b]

x.slice!(:a)
TypeError: can't convert Symbol into Integer

Just yet another incompatibility, but for the better!

jasmine-headless-webkit really helps with that. guard-jasmine-headless-webkit makes it all even more enjoyable, although there’s one caveat – it’s not so easy to set it all up.

There is a great guide for that, but it lacks some important details on running guard-jasmine-headless-webkit without graphical interface (X server).

Assuming you already have Xvfb installed, execute this command to run Xvfb in the background:

Xvfb :0 -screen 0 1024x768x24 > /dev/null 2>&1 &

And then you need to setup the DISPLAY shell variable in order for guard-jasmine-headless-webkit to automatically connect to our virtual frame buffer. Here’s the excerpt from my .bash_profile (it first checks if there is Xvfb running on display :0 and only then sets the DISPLAY variable):

xdpyinfo -display :0 &>/dev/null && export DISPLAY=:0

The result is a function, which outputs a nicely indented HTML. Note, however, that it’s a very basic solution. It doesn’t cope well with anything other than Strings and Numbers (unless your objects support a nice to_s method).

# Prints nested Hash as a nested <ul> and <li> tags
# - keys are wrapped in <strong> tags
# - values are wrapped in <span> tags
def HashToHTML(hash, opts = {})
  return if !hash.is_a?(Hash)

  indent_level = opts.fetch(:indent_level) { 0 }

  out = " " * indent_level + "<ul>\n"

  hash.each do |key, value|
    out += " " * (indent_level + 2) + "<li><strong>#{key}:</strong>"

    if value.is_a?(Hash)
      out += "\n" + HashToHTML(value, :indent_level => indent_level + 2) + " " * (indent_level + 2) + "</li>\n"
    else
      out += " <span>#{value}</span></li>\n"
    end
  end

  out += " " * indent_level + "</ul>\n"
end

Who knows, maybe someone somewhere finds it useful.

Update: much more concise solution by Piotr Szotkowski.

Really made my day. Thanks Krzysztof!