Redmine

Hi!

Our redmine 2.2.4 ran over 1 year without any problems and minimal technical attention (ubuntu 12.02 LTS). Migration to a new server (Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Server Version: Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.5.9-1ubuntu4.5 Phusion_Passenger/4.0.53) and updating Redmine to 2.5.2 went very well. Redmine's environment is:

Environment:
  Redmine version                2.5.2.stable
  Ruby version                   1.9.3-p484 (2013-11-22) [x86_64-linux]
  Rails version                  3.2.19
  Environment                    production
  Database adapter               Mysql2
SCM:
  Subversion                     1.8.8
  Cvs                            1.12.13
  Git                            1.9.1
  Filesystem                     
Redmine plugins:
  clipboard_image_paste          1.8
  redmine_all_files              0.0.3
  redmine_better_gantt_chart     0.9.0
  redmine_didyoumean             1.2.0
  redmine_extended_watchers      0.0.4
  redmine_lightbox               0.0.1
  redmine_monitoring_controlling 0.1.1
  redmine_my_page_queries        0.0.1
  redmine_people                 0.1.8
  redmine_theme_changer          0.1.0
  sidebar_hide                   0.0.7

The only (very disturbing) problem is, that redmine is not loaded reliably on apache2 restart. That means, after a system reboot (which includes a restart of apache2) in all cases passenger module is loaded correctly (so verified from apache log) but redmine application is not loaded and yields an ERROR 404 when accessing redmine's page. A second restart of apache2 nearly always fixed the problem.

I tried the following to get redmine more stable starting/loading: from passenger documentation I learned, that applications are not initially loaded but when accessing the application. So as a workaround I tried to preload redmine by adding the following lines in the site-configuration:

# BOC 20141020 corresponding http://www.redmine.org/boards/2/topics/31783
PassengerMinInstances 1

</VirtualHost>

# BOC 20141020 corresponding http://www.redmine.org/boards/2/topics/31783
        PassengerPreStart http://myserver.cc/redmine2

The idea behind this is that redmine would immediately load after apache2 restart and yield the following passenger status:

root@srvkisweb2:/etc/apache2/sites-available# passenger-status
Version : 4.0.53
Date    : 2014-11-14 14:24:46 +0100
Instance: 32605
----------- General information -----------
Max pool size : 6
Processes     : 1
Requests in top-level queue : 0

----------- Application groups -----------
/usr/share/redmine#default:
  App root: /usr/share/redmine
  Requests in queue: 0
  * PID: 32276   Sessions: 0       Processed: 81      Uptime: 42m 5s
    CPU: 0%      Memory  : 118M    Last used: 4m 45s ago

Now I can probe passenger-redmine running in ps and doing apache2-restart if not found.

In general I found that a second restart of apache2 loads redmine correctly

Are there any ideas where to look after or what could be the reason for this unreliable behavior of passenger/redmine? Currently it's no good feeling.

Thanks a lot

Alex