passenger - Rails app randomly crashes with error "Premature end of script headers" -

I am hosting Ruby on Rails 2.0.2 on DreamHost. It's on an Apache 2 server, running on top of Fusion passenger.

The application often gives a 500 error "Rail app failed to start properly", but at random times. This happens when the application is under high load, although I can not confirm it. It only receives about 2,000 pageviews per day, so I do not think the load should actually be an issue.

Apache logs correlate to 500 responses with errors: "Premiere of script headers" are just seeing logs at 9 o'clock, error is repeated three or four times. This is clearly unacceptable.

Less often, the application throws a fusion passenger page with a stack trace and error "broken pipes".

No listings from Rails log in errors.

This is on the site hosted on both forums and livehosts, but I can not replicate it on the local development server.

So the real question I think is: When do I start debugging this problem?

It turns out that I was only killing my memory cap on the DreamHost shared server

I ran several rail applications in one account, many of them were for testing and prototype only. The train uses a lot of memory and so I was quickly reaching my allocation. Support told me that "I examined our logs and in the last three days, one rabbi died 2325 times". Ohops

Solution: If you can help it, do not try to run the rail in a common environment. I'm going to switch at least one app soon to the VPS host.