Development vs Production Performance over a VPN

Rails
1

A meaty issue for the networking gurus out there. I am using my
development and production environments over a VPN that I have set up
between two office locations. The issue is that my production
application instance runs as fast as I could want, but the development
environment is extremely slow, like “click a link and get some coffee”
slow. Both instances are plain vanilla from the manual, they both run
on Ubuntu 10.04LTS and both use a MySQL back end. The main difference
is that the development instance runs on a WebBrick server and the
Production instance runs on Apache2 with Passenger Phusion. All of
the servers are on the same subnet and in fact, the boxes sit right
next to each other on the same Gigabit bridge. The development
database is actually on a separate machine from the web server whereas
the Production Web Server and Database run on separate Virtual
Machines on the same server. The real nub is that when I am on the
same subnet, I can hardly tell the difference between the two
instances - they run pretty much at the same speed. It’s only when I
am running on a separate subnet over the VPN that the performance
difference is so drastic.

Any ideas? Does WebBrick send out a lot more data to the browser than
Apache? I run the development instance (Rails Server) in a terminal
in the foreground on the development box so I can see the log file
when I need to and kill the server easily. Should I run it in the
background? Is there any communication between the browser and the
foreground process? I’m just trying to figure out what is being sent
over the VPN since that seems to be the bottleneck.

2

On Dec 13, 2011, at 1:34 PM, danm wrote:

next to each other on the same Gigabit bridge. The development
in the foreground on the development box so I can see the log file
when I need to and kill the server easily. Should I run it in the
background? Is there any communication between the browser and the
foreground process? I’m just trying to figure out what is being sent
over the VPN since that seems to be the bottleneck.

the difference is almost certainly caching… Rails_env production uses
caching and rails_env development does not. The reasons for this should
become evident to anyone developing on rails for any period of time.

Suggest that instead of trying to force your html sessions through the
VPN tunnel, use a remote desktop like freenx.
You install freenx server somewhere on that remote office and get the
free client from nomachine.com and you can then run firefox on the
remote end and they will run at roughly the same speed (let alone the
obvious benefits to trying to make code changes remotely).

Craig

3

On Dec 13, 2011, at 1:34 PM, danm wrote:

Any ideas? Does WebBrick send out a lot more data to the browser than
Apache?

I’m going to guess the problem is latency–lots of small requests, which
doesn’t show up at all on the local net.

–
Scott R.
[email protected]
http://www.elevated-dev.com/
(303) 722-0567 voice