installing sunport_rails on ubuntu production

We've added search functionality to Toygaroo with Solr via sunspot_rails.

If you are going to install it on Ubuntu then make sure you do:

sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk

First!

nginx, rails and ubuntu - 502 bad gateway

We were getting tons of 502 errors under load, but then I stumbled across a posting in a news group.

cat /proc/sys/net/core/somaxconn

Will show you how many connections you can have. This should be 1024, because Phusion Passenger is hard coded for this value. Mine was 128!

Do this:

sudo sysctl -w net.core.somaxconn=1024

And then restart nginx.

rotating nginx logs

Since moving most of my systems over to plain Ubuntu on EC2 (as opposed to using ec2OnRails) I've needed to figure out certain things - like rotating the nginx logs (using Nginx instead of apache).

Simply create a file in /etc/logrotate.d/nginx that looks like this

/opt/nginx/logs/*.log {
  daily
  missingok
  rotate 30
  compress
  delaycompress
  sharedscripts
  postrotate
    /etc/init.d/nginx restart
  endscript
}

move from ec2onrails

Recently the performance on FilmAmora.com has been plummeting. And I had no idea why. Often apache was timing out waiting for a mongrel. Very little development has happened recently on FilmAmora, so I was stumped.
So - like a good developer - I took this as a chance to make a drastic move from ec2onrails machines to straight ubuntu, with everything else installed by hand.

It has made a HUGE difference. So much so that I could actually drop a machine from the configuration and still have better response times.

I followed these instructions to get started: rails-nginx-passenger-ubuntu. I also switched to nginx and ruby enterprise edition - just to make following the instructions easier.

So far so good. It took a couple hours and presto a leaner meaner installation. My NewRelic Apdex score went from .5 to .9.