How can I debug these runaway ruby processes?

Question

Seemingly out of nowhere (I didn't make any code changes or server changes), I've got dozens of ruby processes running my server into the ground:

How can I track down what all of those processes are attached to?

Server is running Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS (hardy) with Passenger and Apache 2 Red Hat Enterprise.

Answer 1

Look in /proc/5430 for example for information about the processes. /proc/5430/fd contains symlinks to all the open files, also see this post for information how to connect to running processes and view the memory it's using. Also, and a bit more simply, lsof | grep pid will show open files for the process, and ps auxf will show a process tree.