Rails 3 Passenger Lag

Question

I've setup my website with Rails 3 and Passenger (via nginx) and, although its only being used by one person, the web server has to essentially wake up the rails instance to render the page. This happens only when the website is not accessed for a while (hence its sleeping), but I'm a little paranoid that could it still lag like so when the website is operating on a production level (don't get mixed with the development/production mode, the sleeping website is running in production mode when I'm checking it out).

Any ideas? Or this just a sleep and wakeup thing when nobody's using the website.

Answer 1

There is an easy fix just edit your nginx.conf and set passenger_min_instances to a value larger then zero. This way passenger always keeps one instance alive; this will prevent the "lag" as you describe it. Read more about it in the Passenger Nginx documentation.

Answer 2

Take a look at passenger_pool_idle_time. It states the maximum number of seconds that an application instance may be idle. That is, if an application instance hasn’t received any traffic after the given number of seconds, then it will be shutdown in order to conserve memory.