proxy: error reading status line from remote server
A few months ago, on Swirrl’s test server, we were seeing errors like this in the Apache error log, about once a day (normally when the server had been idle for a while – i.e. overnight)
proxy: error reading status line from remote server ...The (ruby on rails) application would be non-responsive, and the only way to get it going again would be to restart its mongrels.
After a bit of head-scratching and Googling, we realized that it was because we didn’t have the MySQL gem installed on that server. The MySQL gem installs a MySQL API module for Ruby. It provides the same functions for Ruby programs that the MySQL C API provides for C programs.
(We also made a small change to our Apache config, but I don’t think that this made any difference.)
One small gotcha is that some of the ActiveRecord error messages produced with/without the MySQL gem are different, so if you’re doing any custom error handling (e.g. for database uniqueness violations etc), you might want to check this.
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