Arctus Blog

We have released beta 1 of DocBox, our tag based document management system.

This is a very minor release, and fixes the problem we had with FastCGI and Rails using 100% of the CPU. Functionality of the application remains unchanged.

The installer can be downloaded at the DocBox product page.

FastCGI problem

The problem is that FastCGI continuously spawns ruby processes, which use 100% of the CPU. Mod_fastcgi produces very little useful logging information, and although we could see that Ruby was being invoked, we had no real idea as to where the problem lay.

Initially, we suspected that a conflicting version of Rails was the culprit. Our first release of DocBox coincided with the release of Rails 1.2.4, and it just so happened that the first system to show this problem was the first system on which we had installed Ruby’s OneClick package and Rails 1.2.4. Since then we’ve seen the problem happen elsewhere and we can’t find a common link.

I’ll write a detailed analysis of our installer soon, but the major component is an almost full copy of win32 ruby (minus the docs and gem cache). We updated Ruby and all of the gems, repackaged the installer and still the same problem affected at least three of our test systems.

Our final resolution was to remove Apache and use Mongrel as a win32 service. This works well for small-scale installations but won’t scale without some extra work.

Hopefully we’ll resolve the FastCGI problem one day, but we’ll also look at other options.

In the meantime, please let us know what you think to DocBox!