Is Ruby stable for production use?

Rails
1

Hi,

I realise that Windows is a poor platform and that Webrick is a
development,
not production, server. However, we have started seeing this crop up
when
perfectly simple page to page links are invoked…

[2006-03-28 08:32:21] ERROR Errno::ECONNABORTED: Software caused
connection
abort
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/httpresponse.rb:324:in write' /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/httpresponse.rb:324:in_write_data’
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/httpresponse.rb:296:in
send_body_string' /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/httpresponse.rb:187:insend_body’
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/httpresponse.rb:104:in send_response' /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/httpserver.rb:79:inrun’
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:173:in start_thread' /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:162:instart_thread’
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:95:in start' /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:92:instart’
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:23:in start' /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:82:instart’
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rails-1.0.0/lib/webrick_server.rb:69:in
`dispatch’

Given the other problems that have been noted (and re-created by us) on
Mac
OS X…

Is Ruby stable for production use? I see the wonder of Rails, there are
lots
of great ideas in it. However, I am a little nervous about the stability
of
the underlying language on the web.

I understand that the Base Camp project supports 40,000 hits per day
which
is indicative of a decently sized project… how have they achieved
stability? Our intention, in production, is to run Rails on Apache.
Ideally
this will be on Linux or Solaris 10 but there is a very high probability
that customer’s will force us to deploy to Windows 2003 Server. Is RoR
going
to be stable? Its performance on a per transaction basis is excellent
but we
need uptime and consistency as well.

Anyone had any real production experiences, on Apache and especially on
2003
server?

Sean.

2

There’s plenty of people running Rails as a production platform - guys
like Ezra have posted about his setup at Yakima Herald in great detail
in the past - but I’m not aware of any high traffic Windows based
sites out there.

Many people (including myself) are using Windows laptops for
development, but I haven’t seen a lot of discussion of high traffic
production sites using Windows. I run my dev/Windows apps under
mongrel, which I’ve found highly reliable, but I’m generally not
serving thousands of pages from it on the train in the mornings!

Rails itself is very stable though, if you do your research on how to
set it up and how it interacts with e.g. Apache or lighttpd. You
should be able to find lots of info on running it under Linux or *BSD
in the mailing list archives.

Regards

Dave M.

3

Thanks for the info. Like most people, we’ve been running production
Java
and PHP systems here successfully on Linux - as you’d expect. I don’t
envisage the Windows deployments being high traffic through Rails - the
transactional service processing will be done in Java services, Rails
will
be the web application part of the system, if that makes sense.
Similarly
the sort of deployments to Windows will be smaller scale than for a *nix
based system.

The problems that have been cropping up are on development machines. The
error message I posted:

[2006-03-28 08:32:21] ERROR Errno::ECONNABORTED: Software caused
connection

abort

crops up a lot on Windows (running Webrick, ruby/rails on Cygwin). It is
not
a high volume issue. I’ll Google it to see if anyone else has seen this
error message. It degrades pretty gracefully in that after a long delay
the
page actually loads. The long delay, however, could be embarassing in
product demos (let alone in production).

Thanks again.

Sean.

4

if I understand right and you’re using Mac OS X, this could be the
known bug with the broken Ruby that Apple ships with OS X.

if so, here’s your solution:

–
Giles B.
www.gilesgoatboy.org

5

Running rails on Apache should be similar in any OS. Apache is the
same everywhere and has achieved stability on all platforms. It uses
the same method of displaying rails apps everywhere and ruby itself is
mature and stable.

I honestly don’t think there should be a problem whatever the OS is.
Given that Win95 is not used. :wink:

On 3/28/06, Sean B. [email protected] wrote:

    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/httpresponse.rb:324:in
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:162:in

OS X…
to be stable? Its performance on a per transaction basis is excellent but we

Rails mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails

–

6

I use Mac OS X myself because, well, I only own Macs personally. The
guys at work all use Windows or Linux because work doesn’t own any
Macs. I’ll have a look at that link though. Cheers.

7

I agree that Apache is Apache (although not as much on Windows as on
*nix).

I think the issues we had were to do with Webrick rather than Ruby or
Rails. We have not tested Rails on Apache yet (early stages of
development).

8

Sean B. wrote:

crops up a lot on Windows (running Webrick, ruby/rails on Cygwin).

Do not use Cygwin Ruby. It’s full of hassles like that, plus it’s
significantly slower.
Under Windows, use either One-Click Installer Ruby or Instant Rails.

Best regards,
Alex Verkhovsky