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Rich
Asked: 2009-05-30 19:26:16 +0800 CST

Running Ruby on Rails App on Apache + Passenger == to much memory

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I'm running redmine (a RoR app) on my server using passenger / Apache 2.2. Passenger and ruby are using way too much memory.

Is there a more memory effective way to run redmine/ruby?

I only need to support a half dozen redmine users. I want to continue to use Apache, but I'm open to all suggestions that aren't "use nginx/lighttpd" instead.

(The following data is from a 512MB VPS, so Ruby is using more than 128MB just for redmine)

user ....... %mem   ....... process
-----------------------------------
www-data ... 13.6   0:00.65 ruby1.8
www-data ... 12.2   0:04.86 ruby1.8

www-data ...  9.4   0:04.15 apache2
www-data ...  9.0   0:13.94 apache2
www-data ...  3.2   0:00.27 apache2

root     ...  2.5   0:00.23 apache2 
root     ...  1.9   0:01.19 ruby1.8

So, what's better for me than Passenger?

Thanks for your thoughts!!

ruby ruby-on-rails vps phusion-passenger redmine

5 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can configure how many Rails processes Apache/passenger spawns. For your size (3 concurrent requests) you should be fine with 2 rails processes:

    Set these in your apache config:

    PassengerMaxPoolSize 2
PassengerMaxInstancesPerApp 2

    The MaxPoolSize determines how many instances can be started maximally, the MaxInstancesPerApp determines how many instances each web-app can have.

    You might want to play with:

    PassengerPoolIdleTime

    to specify how many seconds an instance must be idle before it is unloaded. Default is 300 seconds.

    I run pretty high traffic web application with 3 instances without any problems.

    Oh and - the Ruby Enterprise Edition helps too.

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  2. Are you using ruby enterprise? http://www.rubyenterpriseedition.com/

    • 2

  3. Either use Ruby Enterprise Edition (recommended with Passenger), or use Ruby 1.9, which is also loads faster.

    • 1

  4. How many concurrent requests do you need to support ? I would use nginx and a small cluster of mongrels. This way you can limit the amount of resource your ruby application uses.

    • 1

  5. I had more success running mongrels/mongrel_cluster with apache proxypass for redmine. It doesn't need that much performance(they're a bunch of very big/slow processes, and tend to call external processes on top of that. You might want to try it in a benchmark situation and see. It was also dead-simple for me to setup.

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