Buckblog: Quick Update

Quick Update

29 August 2006 — A short ping reassures the general readership of the author's existence — 1-minute read

I safely arrived in Idaho a few months ago, and am getting settled in nicely. I apologize for my extended silence—things have been crazy. That, combined with the fact that I can’t seem to keep my blog from crashing for two days running…

Anyway, things should calm down soon, and when they do I’ll spend some time investigating what the deal is. It may be lighttpd, it may be typo, and it may be textdrive. However, I most strongly suspect typo right now.

Reader Comments

I ran into the same exact problem. I was finally exasperated enough to post this thread on the textdrive forums http://forum.textdrive.com/viewtopic.php?id=11147 It turns out typo is a real memory hog. I ended up just switching to wordpress.

Jordan McKible
29 Aug 2006

Glad to hear you've made it safe and sound. Hopefully the boise.rb is treating you well.

pate
29 Aug 2006

I had a bunch of problems with TextDrive recently too. I was running rails apps fine for several months then everything went hinky. I think they ratcheted down the per-process memory limits to just over what a rails process normally takes, so anything slightly bigger (aka, Typo) gets memory allocation errors constantly. I moved to Site5 for some of my sites and PlanetArgon for my Typo blog and they are each much better. I would personally recommend PlanetArgon. I hear Rails Machines are great, too - but they're all sold out. Have fun in Boise, I almost moved there once and it's really quite nice.

Scott Chacon
29 Aug 2006

I just switched from typo to mephisto and am very impressed. Good luck to you either way.

Zack
29 Aug 2006

If you're not running a new-ish version of Typo, it's likely the culprit. Until I upgraded to 4.0, I was experiencing the same issues (though mine was crashing twice a day, at least). Try upgrading to 4.0, it will likely solve the issue.

Larry Wright
29 Aug 2006

Yah, I'm on typo 4.0, and I'm about 99% sure it's not a memory issue. I've got a daemon running that restarts typo anytime it gets larger than some threshold, and it hasn't had to be restarted by the daemon since I upgraded to 4.0. The thing that's wierd is that 90% of the time when my blog goes down, lighttpd goes down, too. I get no warning--just suddenly I'll go to pull up my blog and there's no response. I check, and sure enough, both typo and lighttpd are no longer running. Other rails apps I run on the same host don't have this trouble, though, so it must be typo. Kind of odd. I'm looking into mephisto, but the trouble with that is designing a theme that suits me. We'll see how it goes.

Jamis
29 Aug 2006

Jamis, what is the threshold your daemon checks for? Textdrive's has a per process limit of 48 megs and when that threshold is reached it will just whack it without giving any sort of notification in the process_watchdog.log file. http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg02897.html

Eric Sendelbach
30 Aug 2006

Welcome back Jamis - look forward to reading your updates :)

keeran
30 Aug 2006

Give mephisto a look. You can import Typo into it. It's so much better, imo.

Joe
31 Aug 2006

Thanks, Joe, for the recommendation. I've been checking it out for acouple weeks now--I just need to find the time to work up a theme for it.

Jamis
31 Aug 2006

The Buckblog

assorted ramblings by Jamis Buck

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