Restarting Rails without SSH access

Great tip from the Feedmarker blog

Change the following line in your dispatch.cgi (or dispatch.fcgi, depending on which you use) file:

RailsFCGIHandler.process!

to

RailsFCGIHandler.process! nil, 1

This tells Rails to run the garbage collector and restart your app after each request (if you put the number 2 in there, it’d be two requests, etc.). Then load your site. Now you can go back into your dispatcher file and change the setting back to normal.