How can I run something in a thread with passenger?

Question

Hello, I'm using Phusion Passenger with my nginx to deploy rails/sinatra applications, and I'm currently having a problem.

I want to run a class that checks for new submissions to reddit.com every 30 seconds. But since passenger shuts down the application after x seconds of idle time, it won't keep checking.

Yes, I've tried to set passenger_pool_idle_time to 0, but it still shuts it down.

If you want more details, see the application at github

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

you could use cron to call into your server ever so often, to make sure it's still running. What may be happening is that passenger is starting up an initial process, then forking it for each worker process it needs later. After awhile, it kills the initial process (thinking it has spawned all the children it ever needs), so setting it to not do that might fix it.