Maybe everyone already knew this, but lighttpd spawns new fcgi processess after you’ve killed them.

So if you are running a production rails app and you want to make model/controller changes effective without restarting lighttpd (which can take a while if you have several fcgi apps) you can do something like:

ps aux | grep greasemonkeyed | egrep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9