Some days ago, I have introduced you to mod_rails. I totally freaked out by the idea to let RoR running inside of Apache. Just without using FCGI or proxying Mongrel.
Though, I had not much spare time this weekend, I just had to try it out!
First of all:
You guys rock!!! These guys just impressed me how well-thought a first release version can be.
The whole setup and Apache configuration is so damn easy - you can’t go wrong. The setup script even detects missing linux packages and tells you exactly what to do, depending on the hosting distribution.
So I switched one of my RoR applications to mod_rails …..
But after using it for some minutes I got heavely disappointed. It is just no good hosting option for my situation: [My server is a Debian VPS with 265MB-768MB burstable]
The memory consumption the machine went up from 280MB (wo/ mod_rails) to over 700MB. So all my applications started vomiting, because there was no memory left. Only killing apache2 processes helped me to solve the situation.
So I thought, I will be a good guy and RTFM. I stepped across this configuration parameter:
RailsMaxPoolSize <integer>
The manual recommended to set this parameter to “2″ for servers with small memory footprint.
So I did, but it was no help. Same memory consumption by all apache2 processes.
The next step was to not include the mod_rails module in apache. No help, either. So mod_rails wasn’t even running anymore and the memory consumtption was still beyond the pale!
So, the only reason I can imagine, is that one of the newly installed gems (axpr?) and not mod_rails directly is causing that big memory mayhem.
Huh, restoring a backup of my server was the only help to get rid of the situation!!!
What do you think? What might be the cause of my situation?