Well, as I stated in my previous post, I enabled Passenger for my Austin Real Estate site. Well, everything seemed fine for the first few days. But then I noticed that my memory usage was steadily creeping up. I killed my ruby processes and that helped but then it just started creeping up again. After working with Dreamhost, they discovered there was a bug in that version of Passenger and they upgraded it for me and now my memory usage is much lower and holding steady. However, I have another problem. Apparently Passenger disables mod_rewrite. This is fine since Passenger doeesn’t need it to run your Rails app. However, I also had a wordpress instance on my domain. I used a mod_rewrite to redirect users to the blog instead of Rails trying to interpret the url. This no longer works and now my blog is dead. I have several options to fix this. After much deliberating, I have decided to move my Rails app to a subdomain, search.braxtonbeyer.com. I will keep the blog on the main domain as it has most of the content. So, all in all, I am still satisfied with Passenger, but it does pay to do a little research before making major changes to your site.
Tag: dreamhost
Optimizing Rails Server Performance on Dreamhost
Lately, I have been working on some SEO for my Austin Real Estate site. Slowly but surely my traffic has been increasing so I figured it was time for me to solve some long standing issues before my site gets too busy. It is hosted on Dreamhost and has been pretty slow. I built the site in Rails and it was my first production site built using Rails so I figured my ignorance with developing in Rails was causing the problem. I did a lot of reading and optimized my code and environment as much as possible and it really didn’t seem to help much.
So I came to the conclusion that it was my host. Dreamhost has been very open about how they feel about hosting Rails on a shared server. DHH obviously disagrees. But recently Dreamhost started offering a solution. They now offer dedicated virtual hosting plans. I decided to try it. Mine was finally set up a couple of days ago. Well my site immediately crashed. Awesome. My memory usage was constantly running too high. I bumped up my memory allowance and the site became stable again and actually ran a bit faster. However, I still wasn’t satisfied. So then I tried setting up a Mongrel server which Dreamhost started offering along with the virtual servers. I wasn’t too impressed. So what was next? Well Dreamhost also recently started offering Passenger as a Rails hostiing option. I disabled the Mongrel and turned on Passenger. The memory usage immediately dropped and the site had a noticeable speed increase. I think I finally found my answer. This was all a very unscientific series of tests by a complete novice sysadmin but I think the site is much better off. Time will tell.