caught SIGTERM, shutting down

I have deployed a Rails 3.0 app with phusion passanger on this domain name: http://stage.vivendos.com

When i try open the above url, nothing loads up and there is no error displayed on the browser which means that apache was processing the request but it kept on looping itself. When i checked the apache error log, it showed following errors:

[notice] caught SIGTERM, shutting down

[warn] module passenger_module is already loaded, skipping

[notice] Apache/2.2.14 (Ubuntu) Phusion_Passenger/2.2.7 PHP/5.3.2-1ubuntu4.5 with Suhosin-Patch configured -- resuming normal operations

Can anyone tell me what the first line in that error - > caught SIGTERM means and how can I resolve this problem?

thanks,