Seems someone else ran into issues while trying to deploy god.
While, I don’t think god sucks I definitely don’t endorse it. At this point I would only use it under the following conditions:
- Need for a process monitor tool with more dynamic configuration setups. This is where god really shines against monit’s simpler understanding of what process management is about.
- The host that needs monitoring can easily spare at least 16MB for a monitoring process. See below on why.
- I really want an all Ruby solution for all the tools in a system
In general, I am into the whole ‘It is Open Source. If you’re having issues, fix it’ deal so I am not nearly as angry sounding as Brad is about god. However, after having issues with god, I switched to monit for simple process monitoring and restarting. I had far less troubles and got on with other tasks that I considered more important than perfection in a process monitoring system.
For those that are curious here are the issues that I ran into with god:
- Daemonized Ruby took at least 8MB of RAM for the monitoring process. With RAM the way it is, this is not as big a deal. However, if you are trying to get by on a 128MB VPS host every kilobyte counts.
- God itself had issues just randomly dying after some time. Tom promptly fixed it after it was reported and that was great. However, it was a little disappointing that a monitoring process just died.
- Sparse documentation compared to monit’s. Then again this is typical from many Ruby projects and luckily Ruby code is readable enough
- Digging up known issues for god required noodling through groups, forums, and blog posts. Would have been nice to just have a friggin’ FAQ like other sys admin-targeted software I have seen.
I also DO agree as has been said in the comments on Brad’s post that it is the responsibility of the deployer of software to handle the issues with whatever they deploy and just deal with it. The reason I say this is because I fell for the hyped up description of god in the beginning and ultimately paid the price when it sucked up my time. I dealt with it but definitely am less impressed with overhyped marketing descriptions of software these days. Personally, I am not a fan of that type of marketing for software since it seems a little disingenuous to me. But that is just me.
