Cheezburger app feed was down today

The FastCGI gateway on my server went down earlier today, and as a result the ICHC app stopped working for a while. I moved the feed scraper to a separate user account, so it should be less likely to go down now.

Nginx uses a fixed number of FastCGI sockets (currently 5) for each user running on the server. Certain processes (one of which seems to be the PrMac importer I use at MacMegasite) will cause it to run out of FastCGI connections resulting in a ‘Bad Gateway’ error. By moving the app feed to a separate user, it now has its own set of FastCGI sockets so other processes should be less likely to bring it down.

If you do ‘ps ax’ on a DreamHost VPS shell account, you can see how many FastCGI processes are running:

 3927 ?        Ss     0:00 /dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi -b /home/sampo/.php.sock
 3932 ?        S      0:00 /dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi -b /home/jimi/.php.sock
 3933 ?        S      0:00 /dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi -b /home/newapp/.php.sock
 3934 ?        S      0:00 /dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi -b /home/newapp/.php.sock
 3935 ?        S      0:01 /dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi -b /home/mysites/.php.sock
 3936 ?        S      0:00 /dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi -b /home/newapp/.php.sock
 3937 ?        S      0:02 /dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi -b /home/mysites/.php.sock
 3938 ?        S      0:00 /dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi -b /home/newapp/.php.sock

2 thoughts on “Cheezburger app feed was down today”

  1. My app doesn't work. It hasn't worked for a while. It says it can't find the network, even though I am connected. I tried uninstalling it and reinstalling to no avail. Please advise

    1. As long as you have 1.5.4 the problem is with the server, not the application. The server is having problems and has been going down several times a day.

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