Getting the Right Kind of Help Really Matters
I've been having issues with timeouts on a web app that displays certain metrics for the main project I'm on at The Shop. The set-up is that we have a Sinatra app - using the Unicorn server behind an nginx server that's a gateway for the service. I didn't set this up, so I can't really say Why we have the nginx server in front of the unicorn server, as the point of the unicorn server is to handle the load nicely, and it's all on one box, so we're not getting redirection, but for some reason we have this set-up, and we're getting these timeouts.
Initially, I tried to have an EventMachine timer that sent a NULL to the client every 10 sec. This appeared to work, but then we started having issues with the thread it was in dieing. Then we had to put in a check-with-restart on each call. Things clearly weren't getting any simpler, and then I decided to try to convert everything to jruby from MRI, as we really didn't have any good answers as to how this was being deployed and configured. There were just too many holes.
So I reached out to one of the guys that was supposed to be the architect of this deployment scheme. I didn't know who it was, but when I found out I was really quite pleased - it was a guy that I've been interviewing with several times over the course of the last few months at The Shop.
He explained how the deployment was done, where the config and init.d scripts were generated, how to modify their generation, and in short, how to get rid of the timeouts by simply changing a few of the timeouts in the unicorn and nginx servers. So I took his advice, stripped out the EventMachine stuff from the code and then gave it a whirl.
Worked like a champ.
What a difference getting the right help makes. Inside of about an hour I had all the information I needed and had a solution that was cleaner, easier, and more maintainable than I had started with. The problem seems simple: find help, get it, and solve the problem. But too many folks - including me, initially, didn't do that.
Shame on me.