Foreman » Installer

Given the PassengerMemoryLimit has a big warning that it's enterprise only we can't use that. For the other setting they mention 'This option should be considered as a workaround for misbehaving applications. It is advised that you fix the problem in your application rather than relying on this option as a measure to avoid memory leaks.' so setting this by default doesn't feel right.

As a workaround you can add the following to /etc/foreman-installer/custom-hiera.yaml

---
apache::mod::passenger::passenger_max_requests: 100000

This will set it globally for the server, but currently there's no parameter to easily set for the single vhost.

I just talked to Timo and they deploy it with max requests set to 10000, at least on their puppet masters. Please submit a patch to https://github.com/theforeman/foreman-installer/blob/develop/config/foreman.hiera/tuning.yaml to fix it for Foreman. I don't know if Katello will also use it then but that should be easy to verify.

Ewoud, this is not a memory leak, every single Ruby application eventually needs restarting, if it allocates some memory. There was a great talk at FOSDEM about this. Ruby will effectively never return allocated memory to OS, so GC will not help at all and the only way to free memory is to terminate the process.

I don't understand why you accept 100000 requests limit but not like 1 GB top limit, which is IMHO much more useful than 100000 which is little bit artificial (while we know that Foreman w/ Katello takes about 400 MB so 1 GB is sane default to initiate restart).

The reason I wouldn't accept the memory limit is that as I read it, it's not available in the open source release, only in the enterprise release. That means it's not available to us.

Oh really is it? Is this cripple-ware? Jeeez. I had no idea, I live in a perfect world I guess :-)

I will make the patch then.