Pkchukiss – Reality Wine

Yup, that was the cause for the emergency upgrade today.

You see, there’s apparently a bug triggered which crashes the FastCGI set-up we have over here on the server. The entire array of threads handling all the PHP processing just called it quits. Problem is, I couldn’t reproduce this issue, and the only symptoms of the problem is when nginx slaps all the pages with a 502 Gateway error, as well as occasions where pages on the server only load halfway, and then quit.

Because of this annoying problem, I had to find a new alternative to the spawn-fcgi method I was using on the server. A simple Google search leads to PHP-fpm, which patches PHP with an inbuilt FCGI manager. Today’s maintenance was to compile and install PHP-fpm on the server.

It’s annoying, because once you’ve gone down the road of compiling a package from the source files, you’re stuck doing this for the forseeable future: compiling new versions as they appear, and freezing the package in the package manager to avoid having the entire custom set-up overwritten whenever the distribution vendors update their repository. But as an indie-developer (fancy calling myself that) using non-mainstream tools, that’s the way I’m supposed to rock. So I rock. lmao

Besides, the upgraded PHP appears to run better than the spawn-fcgi set-up, so I’m pretty much pleased with the solution. Now hopefully, no weird bugs come up to bite me!

Filed under: General