Downtime when reloading mod_wsgi daemon?

Question

I'm running a Django application on Apache with mod_wsgi. Will there be any downtime during an upgrade?

Mod_wsgi is running in daemon mode, so I can reload my code by touching the .wsgi script file, as described in the "ReloadingSourceCode" document: http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/wiki/ReloadingSourceCode. Presumably, that reload requires some non-zero amount of time. What happens if a request comes in during the reload? Will Apache queue the request and then complete it once the wsgi daemon is ready?

The documentation includes the following statement:

So, if you are using Django in daemon mode and needed to change your 'settings.py' file, once you have made the required change, also touch the script file containing the WSGI application entry point. Having done that, on the next request the process will be restarted and your Django application reloaded.

To me, that suggests that Apache will gracefully handle every request, but I thought I would ask to be sure. My app isn't critical (a little downtime wouldn't be disastrous) so the question is mostly academic.

Thank you.

Answer 1

In daemon mode there is no concept of a graceful restart when WSGI script file is touched to force a download. That is, unlike Apache itself, which will start new Apache server child processes while waiting for old processes to finish up with current requests, for mod_wsgi daemon processes, the existing process must exit before a new one starts up.

The consequences of this are that mod_wsgi can't wait indefinitely for current requests to complete. If it did, then there is a risk that if all daemon processes are tied up waiting for current requests to finish, that clients would see a noticeable delay in being handled.

At the other end of the scale however, the daemon process can't be immediately killed as that would cause current requests to be interrupted.

A middle ground therefore exists. The daemon process will wait for requests to finish before exiting, but if they haven't completed within the shutdown period, then the daemon process will be forcibly quit and the active requests will be interrupted.

The period of this shutdown timeout defaults to 5 seconds. It can be overridden using the shutdown-timeout option to WSGIDaemonProcess directive, but due consideration should be given to the effects of changing it.

Thus, in respect of this specific issue, if you have long running requests still active when the first request comes in after you touched the WSGI script file, there is the risk that the active long requests will be interrupted.

The next notable thing you may see is that even if there are no long running requests and processes shutdown promptly, then it is still necessary to load up the WSGI application again within the new process. The time this takes will be seen as a delay in handling the request. How big that delay is will depend on the framework and your application. The worst offender as far as time taken to start up that I know of is TurboGears. Django somewhat better and the best as far as quick start up times being lightweight micro frameworks such as Flask.

Do note that any new requests which come in while these shutdown and startup delays occur should not be lost. This is because the HTTP listener socket has a certain depth and connections queue up in that waiting to be accepted. If the number of requests arriving is huge though and that queue fills up, then you will start to see connection refused errors in the browser.

Answer 2

No, there will be no downtime. Requests using the old code will complete, and new requests will use the new code.

There will be a small bit more load on the server as the new code loads but unless your application is colossal and your servers are already nearly overloaded this will be unnoticeable.

This is like the apachectl graceful command for Apache as a whole, which tells it to start a new configuration without downtime.