"Emergent Behavior Sucks" by trevor

Tue, 17 May 2005 12:49:00 EDT

I’ve got two Rails apps in ‘production’ mode. That is, they are (were) stable, humming along nicely and hadn’t been changed in weeks. Until this morning, that is.

All of a sudden FastCGI is going nuts spawning copies of itself and complaining of incomplete headers – of course, no crash log is generated, so my only pointer is incomplete headers. Not much help there.

I rebooted the box, killed all the old session files and removed the FCGI IPC directory (to get a clean one). No joy.

I tried switching back to vanilla CGI - works fine so it’s not issues further down the chain (like the DB). Still no joy then.

After much digging (and swearing), I found that by removing the -restart flag from my system-wide FastCGI settings I could make the problem go away.

The problem is, I’ve had the -restart flag set for ages with no issues. I haven’t touched the box in, like, forever (internet time). So from the guy who can often be found saying “OK, I know you don’t think you changed anything but try really hard to remember what you might have done”, I’m saying dammit, I didn’t change anything!

So what’s the deal? Oh wait – it’s Tuesday isn’t it? That must be the problem. Tuesday.

Stupid emergent behavior…

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"Emergent Behavior Sucks" by trevor