First up, let me just say that this FastCGI for IIS has solved many stability issues that we had with older fastcgi products.
We do have one last issue to resolve however. We run Ruby on Rails under FastCGI on IIS6.0 (2k3SP1). We also run Postgres on these servers, but nothing else.
When we make our first request to the server, it takes a few seconds for the Rubyw.exe to start up and compile our code. Once it is started, everything appears to be fairly snappy and generally runs well. Our problem is that after around 5 minutes of being idle, the rubyw.exe process terminates. Another one will start as soon as a request is made, but this makes for a fairly slow browsing experience for our users as they often have to wait for the ruby app to "spin up".
Is there a way to keep these ruby processes running in memory for a lot longer? I've tried tweaking the "InstanceTimeout" value in fcgiext.ini, but this appears to have no effect whatsoever, and the processes still seem to terminate after about 5 minutes.
Any help, or clues that may lead me in the right direction are muchly appreciated! We've solved so many other problems along the way that we've had, this seems to be the last little hurdle to using this solution in production!
Stoo