I am in the process of debugging some Posgtres connection leaks in our application. Few days back we suddenly crossed 100 connections when we should not be - coz we just have 8 unicorn workers and a sidekiq process (25 threads).
I was looking at htop today and saw that a ton of threads were being spawned from my unicorn workers. Eg:
Am I reading this correctly? This should not be happening right? If these are threads being spawned, any idea how to debug this?
Thanks! Btw, my other problem - (Postgres connections) Debugging unicorn postgres connection leak
EDIT
I just followed some tips here - http://varaneckas.com/blog/ruby-tracing-threads-unicorn/ - and when I printed the stack trace from the workers' threads, here's what I got when there are many threads..
[17176] ---
[17176] /u/apps/eventstream_production/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/eventmachine-1.0.8/lib/eventmachine.rb:1057:in `pop'
[17176] /u/apps/eventstream_production/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/eventmachine-1.0.8/lib/eventmachine.rb:1057:in `block in spawn_threadpool'
[17176] ---
[17176] /u/apps/eventstream_production/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/eventmachine-1.0.8/lib/eventmachine.rb:1057:in `pop'
[17176] /u/apps/eventstream_production/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/eventmachine-1.0.8/lib/eventmachine.rb:1057:in `block in spawn_threadpool'
[17176] ---
[17176] /u/apps/eventstream_production/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/eventmachine-1.0.8/lib/eventmachine.rb:1057:in `pop'
[17176] /u/apps/eventstream_production/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/eventmachine-1.0.8/lib/eventmachine.rb:1057:in `block in spawn_threadpool'
[17176] ---
[17176] /u/apps/eventstream_production/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/eventmachine-1.0.8/lib/eventmachine.rb:1057:in `pop'
[17176] /u/apps/eventstream_production/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/eventmachine-1.0.8/lib/eventmachine.rb:1057:in `block in spawn_threadpool'
[17176] ---
[17176] /u/apps/eventstream_production/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/eventmachine-1.0.8/lib/eventmachine.rb:1057:in `pop'
[17176] /u/apps/eventstream_production/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/eventmachine-1.0.8/lib/eventmachine.rb:1057:in `block in spawn_threadpool'
[17176] ---
[17176] /u/apps/eventstream_production/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/eventmachine-1.0.8/lib/eventmachine.rb:1057:in `pop'
[17176] /u/apps/eventstream_production/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/eventmachine-1.0.8/lib/eventmachine.rb:1057:in `block in spawn_threadpool'
[17176] ---
[17176] /u/apps/eventstream_production/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/eventmachine-1.0.8/lib/eventmachine.rb:1057:in `pop'
[17176] /u/apps/eventstream_production/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/eventmachine-1.0.8/lib/eventmachine.rb:1057:in `block in spawn_threadpool'
[17176] ---
[17176] /u/apps/eventstream_production/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/eventmachine-1.0.8/lib/eventmachine.rb:1057:in `pop'
[17176] /u/apps/eventstream_production/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/eventmachine-1.0.8/lib/eventmachine.rb:1057:in `block in spawn_threadpool'
[17176] ---
[17176] /u/apps/eventstream_production/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/eventmachine-1.0.8/lib/eventmachine.rb:1057:in `pop'
[17176] /u/apps/eventstream_production/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/eventmachine-1.0.8/lib/eventmachine.rb:1057:in `block in spawn_threadpool'
[17176] ---
[17176] -------------------
This is my unicorn.rb https://gist.github.com/steverob/b83e41bb49d78f9aa32f79136df5af5f and it spawns a thread for EventMachine in after_fork.
The reason for EventMachine is this --> https://github.com/keenlabs/keen-gem#asynchronous-publishing
Is this normal? Shouldn't the threads be killed? Could this be also causing unncessary db connections to be open? Thanks
UPDATE: I just found out that I am using an older version of the PubNub gem which uses EM and I ran into these lines in the pubnub.log file -
D, [2016-04-06T21:31:12.130123 #1573] DEBUG -- pubnub: Created event Pubnub::Publish
D, [2016-04-06T21:31:12.130144 #1573] DEBUG -- pubnub: Pubnub::SingleEvent#fire
D, [2016-04-06T21:31:12.130162 #1573] DEBUG -- pubnub: Pubnub::SingleEvent#fire | Adding event to async_events
D, [2016-04-06T21:31:12.130178 #1573] DEBUG -- pubnub: Pubnub::SingleEvent#fire | Starting railgun
D, [2016-04-06T21:31:12.130194 #1573] DEBUG -- pubnub: Pubnub::Client#start_event_machine | starting EM in new thread
D, [2016-04-06T21:31:12.130243 #1573] DEBUG -- pubnub: Pubnub::Client#start_event_machine | We aren't running on thin
D, [2016-04-06T21:31:12.130264 #1573] DEBUG -- pubnub: Pubnub::Client#start_event_machine | EM already running