We run our infra on AWS Fargate. This means docker images. Our docker image is based on debian buster packaged with Ruby 2.6.5.

Of late, we’ve had crashes on and off everytime the container boots up. They all have the same symptom: Rails tries to load the sassc gem and it barfs!

The biggest problem is the unpredictability of the crash. It might happen.

It might not!

If you run rails and make use of the sassc gem which you most probably will do, you might run into a problem when the gem is loaded:

/vendor/bundle/ruby/2.6.0/gems/ffi-1.11.1/lib/ffi/library.rb:112: [BUG] Illegal instruction at 0x00007f759d834a15

You’ll see a nasty long thread dump and your app will fail to start.

This is caused by the 2.2.1 version of sassc where the portability between processor architectures was removed post version 2.1.0.

There’s two ways to fix this:

• Downgrade your gem from 2.2.1 to 2.1.0 until the team releases an official patch - The bug is still open and has been reported across multiple ruby versions.

• Install the gem manually like so:

gem install sassc -- --disable-march-tune-native

The above step will cause a manual compile of the underlying libraries for the gem and the problem goes away.

Happy rubying!