Rails stops responding if Idle

Question

I've been having this problem for a while and searched a lot about this, but nothing seems to solve my problem.

I have an application running in Ruby on Rails with NGINX and UNICORN everything with Docker.

If I run the application (docker-compose up) the web site runs perfectly for a few minutes. If the web site stays idle for about 5 to 10 minutes, and I send another request the rails application stops responding giving time out from Unicorn.

The weird part is that every application I develop, have the same problem and the only thing in common these applications have are the Gemfile.

What I found so far is that when the request is sent, NGINX receives this request, pass it to Unicorn, Unicorn receives it and passes to ruby... which doesn't answer and then Unicorn gives me the 502 bad request.

I'm really lost at this one.

this is my NGINX config file:

upstream applicationName {
    # Path to Puma SOCK file, as defined previously
    server unix:/tmp/applicationName.sock fail_timeout=0;
}

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name dev.applicationName.com.br;

  location / {
    autoindex on;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    # time out settings
    proxy_connect_timeout 159s;
    proxy_send_timeout   600;
    proxy_read_timeout   600;
    proxy_buffer_size    64k;
    proxy_buffers     16 32k;
    proxy_busy_buffers_size 64k;
    proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k;
    proxy_pass_header Set-Cookie;
    proxy_redirect     off;
    proxy_hide_header  Vary;
    proxy_set_header   Accept-Encoding '';
    proxy_ignore_headers Cache-Control Expires;
    proxy_set_header   Referer $http_referer;
    proxy_set_header   Host   $host;
    proxy_set_header   Cookie $http_cookie;
    proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Server $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_pass http://applicationName;
  }
}

And this is my unicorn config

@dir = File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__)) + "/.."

worker_processes 2
working_directory @dir

timeout 10

listen File.join('/tmp/applicationName.sock')

preload_app true# if ENV['RAILS_ENV'] != 'development'

GC.respond_to?(:copy_on_write_friendly=) and
  GC.copy_on_write_friendly = true

check_client_connection false

before_fork do |server, worker|
  Signal.trap 'TERM' do
    puts 'Unicorn master intercepting TERM and sending myself QUIT instead'
    Process.kill 'QUIT', Process.pid
  end

  defined?(ActiveRecord::Base) and
    ActiveRecord::Base.connection.disconnect!
end

after_fork do |server, worker|
  Signal.trap 'TERM' do
    puts 'Unicorn worker intercepting TERM and doing nothing. Wait for master to send QUIT'
  end

  defined?(ActiveRecord::Base) and
    ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection
end

This is the Gemfile (nothing wrong with it)

source 'https://rubygems.org'
gem 'rails', '4.2.4'
gem 'unicorn-rails', '~> 2.2'
gem 'pg'
gem 'mysql2', '~> 0.3.18'
gem 'sass-rails', '~> 5.0'
gem 'uglifier', '>= 1.3.0'
gem 'coffee-rails', '~> 4.1.0'
gem 'duktape'
gem 'jquery-rails'
gem 'turbolinks'
gem 'jbuilder', '~> 2.0'
gem 'bootstrap-sass'
gem 'devise'
gem 'simple_form'
gem 'minitest'
gem "paperclip", "~> 4.3"
gem 'aws-sdk', '< 2.0'
gem 'mail_form', '~> 1.5.0.rc'
gem 'sendgrid-ruby'
gem 'zopim_rails'
gem 'meta-tags'
gem 'ckeditor'
gem 'slick_rails'

group :development do
  gem 'better_errors'
  gem 'binding_of_caller', :platforms=>[:mri_20]
  gem 'quiet_assets'
  gem 'rails_layout'
  gem 'spring-commands-rspec'
  gem 'web-console', '~> 2.0'
  gem 'spring'
end
group :production do
  gem 'therubyracer'
end
group :development, :test do
  gem 'factory_girl_rails'
  gem 'faker'
  gem 'pry-rails'
  gem 'pry-rescue'
  gem 'rspec-rails'
  gem 'rubocop'
  gem 'byebug'
end

group :test do
  gem 'capybara'
  gem 'database_cleaner'
  gem 'launchy'
  gem 'selenium-webdriver'
end

The log on the server shows me this, when the error happens:

nginx_1 | 172.17.0.1 - - [05/Feb/2016:12:52:41 +0000] "GET /products HTTP/1.1" 502 574 "http://dev.nutrimais.com.br/" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/48.0.2564.82 Safari/537.36"
web_1   | E, [2016-02-05T12:52:41.551728 #1] ERROR -- : reaped #<Process::Status: pid 9 SIGKILL (signal 9)> worker=0

And on the development log:

Started GET "/products" for 127.0.0.1 at 2016-02-05 12:52:18 +0000
Cannot render console from 127.0.0.1! Allowed networks: 127.0.0.1, ::1, 127.0.0.0/127.255.255.255

Answer 1

In deed it's a problem with the firewall of my Linux server and the DB, which is located in another server. What I did is bring the DB server to the same machine as my rails application. Another way to fix it is change the firewall rules ofthe server machine. I haven't done that and not sure how to. It looks like this problem only happens with MySQL.