Forum: Mongrel Disabling static file lookups?

In looking at a running mongrel process in strace and at the code
itself Mongrel will always look for a file under "public" (with and
without a .html extension). When those filesystem lookups fail, it
then passes the request to Rails.

So my question is, would you get more performance by disabling this
lookup and just handing it off to Rails from the get go?

I understand that in development, the current behavior is desired as
Mongrel is acting as the primary HTTP server. But in production, with
a HTTP server like Apache or nginx in front and configured to serve
static files, then it might make sense to not have Mongrel concern
itself with looking for static files.

Maybe the OS caches those filesystem calls (stat cache?) and this
would be a crazy premature optimization.

Thoughts?

/Cody

On Dec 11, 2008, at 6:05 PM, Cody Caughlan wrote:

> a HTTP server like Apache or nginx in front and configured to serve
> static files, then it might make sense to not have Mongrel concern
> itself with looking for static files.
>
> Maybe the OS caches those filesystem calls (stat cache?) and this
> would be a crazy premature optimization.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> /Cody
>


  You should be able to alter the railshandler to not do these lookups
when a config option is set. Merb uses rack middleware to do the
static pages and that can be easily turned off in production. I
believe latest rails does this as well and maybe you can disable these
checks with rack in rails as well?

Cheers-

Ezra Zygmuntowicz
ez@engineyard.com

Ezra- thanks for your feedback.

My greater question is: is it worth it, in the long run? Or is it too
negligible?

/Cody

On Dec 12, 2008, at 8:57 AM, Cody Caughlan wrote:

> Ezra- thanks for your feedback.
>
> My greater question is: is it worth it, in the long run? Or is it too
> negligible?
>
> /Cody


  Hmm i bet it is probably worth it but only if you are trying to
squeeze every last drop of perf out of your setup. A fast local
filesystem does stats fairly quick and I doubt you will be bale to
tell the difference.

  But if you have overtaxed disks or are using NFS or a shared
filesystem of sorts then every littel bit helps to keep from touching
the filesystem.

  So its probably worth it eventually when you get big but probably is
not worth it until you actually know it is a problem.

Cheers-

Ezra Zygmuntowicz
ez@engineyard.com