From: Nathaniel Talbott <nathaniel@...>
Date: 2003-12-08T22:47:00+09:00
Subject: Ruby blocks... forever

Ruby 1.8.1preview2, running on Debian Linux. Server is WEBrick based, 
and the main extensions used are Ruby/ODBC and Ruby/Postgres.

I just tried to put the server in to production (approximately an 
exponential increase in users, although it was done at a lower-traffic 
time of day) and Ruby decided to hang on me. Here's the appropriate 
line from top:

     PID USER      RSS WCHAN        FLAGS LC STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME 
COMMAND
   16419 se        15M rt_sigsus       40  0 S     0.0  1.7  24:52 server

Although I'm not sure, I think the WCHAN indicates that the process is 
blocked waiting for something to happen. What, I don't know.

I suspect Ruby/ODBC as the culprit, but here are my questions:

   1. What could cause such a hang? Where should I even begin looking?
   2. The process is still sitting there, doing nothing. Is there any 
more information I can get out of it before I kill it?

Thanks,


Nathaniel

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