Big things to do when deploying a rails app

Question

In the question What little things do I need to do before deploying a rails application I am getting a lot of answers that are bigger than \"little things\". So this question is

Answer 1

Use some process monitoring

Sometimes your processes (mongrels in many cases) will die or other bad things will happen to them. For example a memory leak could cause the memory consumption to increase indefinitely or a process could start using all your CPU.

monit and god are both good choices to save you from this fate. They can also be set to hit a url on your site to check for a 200 response code.

Set up server monitoring

Some suggestions in this space: fiveruns, newrelic, scout

These tools will record detailed metrics on your servers and are invaluable when something goes wrong and you need to see what actually happened. They also give you real time information on server load.

If you have a cluster this kind of reporting is even more critical.

Backup

Write a script to periodically backup your database and any other assets that your users can upload. S3 might be a good choice for this.