Resque: Slow worker startup and Forking

Question

I'm currently moving my application from a Linode setup to EC2. Redis is currently installed on a remote instance with various worker instances interacting with the queue. Thats all going fantastic.

My problem is with the amount of time it takes for a worker to be 'instantiated' and slow forking. Starting a worker will usually take between 30 seconds and a minute(from god.rb starting the worker rake task and the worker actively starting work on the queue). I could live with that, but I've not experienced such a wait time on my current Linode production box so I believe its one of my symptoms to a bigger problem. Next issue is that jobs that took a second or less in my previous environment now seem to take about 5 to 10 times longer..

I'm assuming this must be some sort of issue with my Ubuntu install on EC2? One notable difference is that I'm running REE 1.8.7-2010.01 in my new setup, and REE 1.8.6 on the old Linode boxes.

Anyone else experienced these issues?

Answer 1

It turns out I had overestimated the CPU power of an EC2 small instance. Moved my workers to a large instance and all is well.