The last Passenger release, 2.2.10, has a bug that causes Apache to freeze when used under moderate load (Phusion say high load but we’ve seen it on quite moderate conditions). We recommend that anyone using Passenger 2.2.10 upgrade to 2.2.11 asap. Ubuntu Hardy packages are now available in our repository.
Phusion released Passenger 2.2.10 this week, fixing some bundler compatibility bugs and a file descriptor bug that could lead to “mysterious crashes”.
We’ve built our Ubuntu Hardy packages for i386 and AMD64 architectures which are now available from the Brightbox apt repository. We’ve also upgraded our librack-ruby packages to 1.1.0.
I’ve just properly announced my Ruby full text indexing library, Xapian Fu, on my personal blog. It’s a Ruby interface to Xapian, an open source search engine Library. Xapian Fu basically gives you a Hash interface to Xapian – so you get a persistent Hash with full text indexing built in.
For example:
require 'xapian-fu'
include XapianFu
db = XapianDb.new(:dir => 'example.db', :create => true,
:store => [:title, :year])
db << { :title => 'Brokeback Mountain', :year => 2005 }
db << { :title => 'Cold Mountain', :year => 2004 }
db << { :title => 'Yes Man', :year => 2008 }
db.flush
db.search("mountain").each do |match|
puts match.values[:title]
end
The full announcement is here, github project here and rdoc here. Hope you find it useful!
The Phusion team released Passenger 2.2.9 today, which adds support for Rails 3, the GEM bundler, and fixes a couple of bugs. As usual Brightbox are providing Ubuntu Hardy packages for i386 and AMD64 architectures, available now from the Brightbox apt repository.
This package won’t actually support Rails 3 just yet though as we’ve yet to package and test the librack 1.1.0, which Rails 3 depends on. We’re working on it now and once we’re happy with it we’ll add new packages to our repository as usual.
I’m speaking at this month’s North West Ruby Group meeting about some of the tools available that can be used to solve common Ruby and Rails deployment and development problems. “UNIX: Rediscovering the wheel”.
Brightbox is also sponsoring the meeting so there will be free pizza afterwards (free as in pizza, not as in speech).
More details on the NWRUG blog page.
Hope to see you there!
Over the last few weeks we’ve been working on scaling our shared MySQL facilities. Until recently, we’ve been able to run a single (albeit hefty) shared MySQL cluster but due to growing demand we’ve needed to scale this up considerably. The main cluster has had some performance problems recently and, while some tuning and vertical scaling bought us some time (we more than doubled the resources of the main cluster), the real focus has been on horizontal scaling.
We’ve built a bunch of new master-master replicated pairs and our backend systems now distribute customers between them on sign-up. We’ve also been contacting some customers and moving them to new clusters, to relieve the pressure on the main cluster (customers with heavy requirements are still recommended managed dedicated clusters – these will be available to purchase simply as additional products soon). We’re using puppet to automate a lot of the setup of the new clusters and can deploy a new one, with monitoring and backups, very quickly.
This work has almost quadrupled the shared MySQL resources within the space of a couple of weeks, and provides a simple platform to continue scaling indefinitely. The decentralisation also makes some aspects of administration easier, such as arranging downtime for maintenance.
The visible differences are small: rather than everyone connecting to one address, sqlreadwrite.brightbox.net, each account needs to use the address provided in the control panel. The old sqlreadwrite.brightbox.net has become db01.mysql.vm.brightbox.net (the old name will of course continue to work indefinitely), and the new clusters are at db02.mysql.vm.brightbox.net, db03.mysql.vm.brightbox.net etc. Our wiki documentation has been updated to reflect this – customers on the old cluster don’t have to make any changes, it only really affects new customers and customers we’ve contacted to arrange a move.
We’ve also been working on improving the slow query logger to provide more useful results. Instead of reporting every slow query ever logged, it produces an intelligent summary of the week’s queries. This means when you see a slow query in the control panel, it means it’s shown up repeatedly and very likely needs attention, as opposed to queries that just happened to take longer than usual due to load on the cluster. We’ll be rolling this work out just after Christmas.
This work represents a big investment in our shared MySQL platform, which we know is invaluable to a lot of our customers, and allows us to keep growing without sacrificing performance.
We’ve just added Caspar Clemens Mierau’s package for the Apache x-sendfile module to our Ubuntu Hardy package repositories, so now it’s trivially easy for Brightbox customers to start using it. We’ve also built an AMD64 version too. Just install the package, enable it and reload Apache:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-xsendfile
sudo a2enmod xsendfile
sudo invoke-rc.d apache reloadPassenger 2.2.6 (quickly followed by 2.2.7) was released last week and we now have i386 and AMD64 Ubuntu Hardy packages available in our repository.
As usual, details on installing the packages from our repository are available on our wiki.
If you’re using Passenger and it’s making you happy, please do consider supporting its development by donating money in the form of an “Enterprise License” direct from Phusion, the company behind it.
As you’ll all know, Rails has page caching baked right in – the first time an action is hit, it writes a html file of the result to the filesystem. Subsequent hits are served direct from the html file at high speed by the web server without ever involving your Rails app.
Expiring the cache is just a case of deleting the html file. But what if you want to expire an entire tree of cache files? Say you change something in a header or footer, so every single page needs expiring at once.
The usual way to do this is to just delete the entire page cache tree, with FileUtils.rm_rf. This works pretty well, but with a big tree you’ll get strange behaviour under high load due to concurrent access. Whilst your rm_rf process is deleting the tree, file by file, your webserver will still be looking in there for page cache files and Rails will still be trying to write them.
Read the rest of this entry »
We’ve built 32bit and 64bit Ubuntu Hardy packages for Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2009.10. These packages are still in beta, and this is quite a major change from the default Hardy Ruby interpreter,which is 1.8.6, so we recommend you test thoroughly before putting it into production. We’ve been using them for a couple of days with no problems though.
As with our other Ruby EE packages, they upgrade (i.e replace) the standard 1.8 Ruby installation. This means all your gems stay the same, and everything on your system immediately starts using them (Phusion’s own Ubuntu packages do not work like this). We’ve tested it with the usual Railsy native gems, RMagick, Mongrel, fasthread etc. and have had no problems.
If you’re on a Brightbox, just edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-rubyee.list and change the rubyee component to rubyee-testing:
deb http://apt.brightbox.net/ hardy rubyee-testing
Then update and upgrade:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libruby1.8
If you’re not on a Brightbox, see the instructions on our wiki first. The wiki also documents how to revert back to the old packages.
As said above, we now have 64bit packages available too (which was recently made easier by some Debian package dependency updates, also included in our repository).
Please let us know how they worked out for you on our forum. Thanks!
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