Why am I getting an Apache Proxy 503 error?

Question

My server was doing just fine up until yesterday. It was running Redmine, and it was the happiest little server until my \"friend\" imported a SQL table that my

Answer 1

Are you sure they're restarting in the correct order? I've had weird issues where Apache starts, then Mongrel starts and although Mongrel is running, Apache still throws the proxy error.

I've solved this in the past with various incantations and restarts of Apache and eventually the gods are happy. It seems that sometimes the Mongrel processes don't properly shut down so you have to manually kill them. Here's a link with some [possible] help.

I ended up adding a "kill" option to my /etc/init.d/ mongrel script because it happened so much. It stop Mongrel, killed all Mongrel sessions, started Mongrel and restarted Apache.

    kill)
      echo "Stopping, killing, starting, and restarting Apache..."
      mongrel_cluster_ctl stop -c $CONF_DIR --clean
      killall -u mongrel
      mongrel_cluster_ctl start -c $CONF_DIR --clean
      /etc/init.d/httpd restart
      RETVAL=$?
  ;;

Probably not a very good solution but the evil went away.