Cheezburger app feed was down today

Posted on February 25, 2010 by | 2 Comments

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
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2 responses to “Cheezburger app feed was down today”

  1. Cc | March 3, 2010 at 11:19 pm |

    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

    • mike | March 4, 2010 at 4:53 am |

      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.