We had the need to hook up a simple ruby web process (non-rails) to our production apache server. As Leslie Hensley pointed out, fcgi and scgi are on the way out, and mongrel + mod_proxy_balancer is the new way to go. We use mongrel extensively in our rails deploys, but always just used WEBrick to do simple serving. To make a long story short, we had to ask ourselves….is mongrel that much better (and in this case better == faster) than WEBrick?
We were helping a client push more data through their apache/tomcat web application running on a Solaris box and decided to switch from the process (prefork) to the threaded(worker) processing model. When we fired up the new apache we started getting errors like these:
[emerg] (45)Deadlock situation detected/avoided: apr_proc_mutex_lock failed. Attempting to shutdown process gracefully.
Not good. After a little digging we found that the default AcceptMutex switched from pthread to fcntl between apache 2.0.49 and 2.0.52.
Adding:
AcceptMutex pthread
to httpd.conf cleared up the errors and we’ve had smooth sailing ever since.