Hanging around
Well the good news is that we’re showing great traffic, membership and revenue growth. The bad news is that there’s an issue with the server occasionally hanging. Unfortunately it doesn’t crash so I am not getting any error message. I’ve asked on the Cherrypy Mail List but I didn’t get any suggestions.
I actually think that Cherrypy probably is quite stable and I suspect that the issue has something to do with my environment. However my deployment strategy isn’t that good; I currently have a standalone Cherrypy server behind Apache with mod_rewrite. There’s quite a lot of problems with this setup such as performance, mismatches between the number of available Apache connections verses the number of Cherrypy threads and there seems to be an issue getting mod_deflate to work with mod_rewrite.
So I think what I’m going to try is switching Cherrypy over to mod_python which will be a better deployment strategy and in addition by changing my environment it may well fix the mysterious random crashes although I strongly don’t like fixing a problem without understanding the root cause.