title: Debugging Stuck Ruby Process - Workling\Starling
body: <p>We have a rails app that about every 24 hours runs the load average on the machine well beyond 5. It looks like a stuck Ruby process specifically related to a background process running to manage event and calendar reminders. It seems like killing it and restarting the app resolves temporarily:</p>
  
  <pre><code>dd   6554     1  0 00:38 ?        00:00:15 /usr/local/bin/ruby /usr/local/bin/starling -d -p 15151 -P /u/apps/dd/shared/starling.pid -q /u/apps/dd/shared/starling -L /u/apps/dd/shared/starling.log
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is there anything better than debugging with GDB?  I don't see much useful info there. </p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Ruby 1.8.7 x86_64</li>
  <li>Rails 2.3.9</li>
  <li>Eventmachine 1.0.3</li>
  <li>Workling 0.4.9.9</li>
  <li>Starling 0.10.1</li>
  <li>CentOS 5.9</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Thanks </p>