Running tracks as a regular cgi is too slow on my hosting server,
so I setup fcgi.  Unfortunately, it’s leaving processes running and
eventually I can’t ssh onto the box because I’ve used up my
concurrent process quota.

I know the idea of fcgi is to keep processes running, but I’m
not sure of the rules as to how they are reused vs launching
new and when procs should timeout and exit.

Ideas?

-Robot

Robot,

FCGI (I presume Apache+FCGI) has problems with Rails, and is no longer recommended. The best options on shared hosting are probably:

* Mongrel or Thin clusters behind an Apache frontend - fine on a VPS but uncommon on shared hosting
* Litespeed - great, but uncommon, not open source
* nginx+FCGI - some good reports, but very uncommon
* Apache+Passenger (aka mod_rails) - a newcomer, but very promising indeed, see http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2008/4/11/passenger-mod_rails-for-apache-launches

All of these are pretty unusual for “standard” web hosts, if you are able to you might think about using a host that specialises in Rails and offers Litespeed or Passenger.

If this is impractical, how about a tool like monit or god - http://www.rubyinside.com/god-extensible-process-monitoring-framework-559.html - to monitor your processes? Or maybe use a hosted service like http://tracks.tra.in/ ?

Thomas.