# Mongrel Web Server 0.3.11 -- Edge Rails and Win32 Compliant **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [March 15, 2006, 9:44am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/mongrel-web-server-0-3-11-edge-rails-and-win32-compliant/54930 "2006-03-15T09:44:57Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Zed\_S](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/z/da6949/32.png) [@Zed\_S](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Zed_S)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2006, 9:44am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/mongrel-web-server-0-3-11-edge-rails-and-win32-compliant/54930/1 "2006-03-15T09:44:57Z")
Hello Folks, This is the big release of Mongrel that’s been in the works for a while now (well, like a week). It is chock full of changes and features, but mostly it syncs up the Win32 side of things, and validates that Edge Rails works without problems. It also features a more extensive and useful example of the GemPlugins called mongrel\_config. First the usual stuff for people without a clue. WHAT IS MONGREL? Mongrel is a small fast little web server project trying to bring the speed of FastCGI and the simplicity of WEBrick for deploying any Ruby web application. It already supports Ruby on Rails, Camping, and Nitro and could soon support IOWA. Since it is a regular old HTTP based server it can be clustered, manipulated, and deployed like any other web server you use. Check out the nifty website at: [http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/](http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/) TOP 10 REASONS TO USE MONGREL 1. It’s damn fast without being a pain to install. 2. It works on tons of platforms with active testing on Win32, FreeBSD, Linux, OSX, and NetBSD. 3. It is probably the very best deployment solution for people doing Win32 Rails development, especially since it actively supports windows services and has a reasonably nice management tool. 4. It’s fast enough that you could probably run your small to medium size Ruby web applications using just Mongrel and be perfectly happy. 5. It actively supports Rails style page caching which could give your application a major performance boost without any extra deployment effort. 6. It uses an insanely correct HTTP parser which I’ve found blocks quite a few exploits. This parser is also what makes Mongrel so Fast. 7. It has a great plugin system that lets you package your extensions as gems and your users just “gem install and go”. 8. It is LGPL so you thieves can make money (but I get Mongrel mods back!) 9. It supports and uses Camping. Camping is cool. And the best reason to use Mongrel is… 1. Isn’t a cool name like Mongrel enough? INSTALLING You might need sudo, you _will_ need Ruby 1.8.4, and you’ll need a compiler (unless you’re on win32). Simple enough. If you have mongrel already try “gem upgrade”. If that causes problems then you might have to clear out gem\_plugin, mongrel, mongrel\_config, and mongrel\_status. This is rare and typically only if people have been tracking my development. For newbies just do this: $ gem install mongrel $ gem install mongrel\_config $ gem install mongrel\_status (if you want this) That’s it. NEW STUFF TO TRY IN 0.3.11 The 0.3.11 release features edge Rails support, some great functionality, big stability improvements, some good docs for folks to start using, and finally the beginning of a config tool implemented as a GemPlugin. Most importantly it completely supports Win32 again and the mongrel\_config tool actually works _better_ in Win32. = Documentation If you haven’t seen it yet, check out [http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/docs/lighttpd.html](http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/docs/lighttpd.html) For a good set of docs for getting Mongrel up in a very fast production deployment running on one machine. Check out [http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/docs/gem\_plugin.html](http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/docs/gem_plugin.html) for docs on writing your very own mongrel\_rails commands as gem plugins. The ability to write your own handlers, filters, and potentially whole applications as plugins coming soon. Adventurous people could try doing a rails plugin by adding “rails” as a dependency on their plugin gem. Especially check out the gpgen tool for getting a mongrel plugin up with minimal effort. == Edge Rails This release was tested with Edge Rails and several applications, but I’d be interested in more people living on the edge. == Config Tool If you’re on Unix (OSX too) or Windows you now have a new thing to play with: mongrel\_config. Once you install the mongrel\_config gem you get a new command for mongrel\_rails. You can try it two ways depending on your platform: UNIX: 1) cd myrailsapp 2) $ mongrel\_rails configtool 3) Hit the web page it says and try starting and stopping your rails app. WIN32: 1) $ mongrel\_rails configtool 2) Hit the web page and install new services, delete them, start them, stop them, check out the start/stop logs, and view all of the service’s parameters. Yeah, win32 wins on this one. And yes, win32 configtool doesn’t need to be in any rails directory, which means smart people will make a simple link that runs this in order to manage their rails apps services. == Camping Mongrel now supports Camping a lot better and uses it extensively in the mongrel\_config plugin. Camping is \_why’s little micro-framework for doing web applications. It’s perfect for little tools like the mongrel\_config plugin. If you’re interested in writing a little application and don’t want a full Rails app then try looking at the code to mongrel\_config to get an idea. It works great, the only thing is that there’s tons of PFM in Camping that seems to break Rails like crazy. Camping == oil. Rails == water. Don’t mix. == The Dreaded TCP Hack Sean Treadway gave me a bit of hack code which jacks the OS listen queue from the default (usually 5) to a whopping 1024. This makes Mongrel handle concurrency much better. Give it a try and let me know how it works for you. THE FUTURE I’ll be writing the filters feature and finally the configuration file that will let you configure any handlers and filters from a .yaml file. This is needed so that people can write plugins to give you special filters, handlers, or whole applications (similar to configtool). After this I’ll be talking with Luis to see if we can consolidate the mongrel\_rails\_service and mongrel\_rails by using the plugin system to implement the commands. We’ll also look at making the mongrel\_config more advanced. Finally I’m talking with the IOWA folks to roll their web app into the Mongrel kennel. Fun stuff! Enjoy the release and feel free to shoot me your problems, praise, and any features requests. Zed A. Shaw > **[Zed A. shaw](https://zedshaw.com/)** > > Personal essays and writings by Zed A. Shaw. ---
**Author:** ![Zed\_S](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/z/da6949/32.png) [@Zed\_S](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Zed_S)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2006, 11:22am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/mongrel-web-server-0-3-11-edge-rails-and-win32-compliant/54930/2 "2006-03-15T11:22:10Z")
Hey Zed, awesome thing! I’d been like, frantically waiting for this “ever since” Mongrel stopped working with Edge a few days ago. Mongrel was _the_ thing missing for making Rails development not suck on a 366-MHz-320MB-RAM iBook Clamsheel 🙂 Just one question: do you think it’d be possible to get the Rails people to update script/server, so that it could start Mongrel as well? Thanks for a great piece of software! Best regards, Raphael ---
**Author:** ![Zed\_S](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/z/da6949/32.png) [@Zed\_S](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Zed_S)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2006, 4:13pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/mongrel-web-server-0-3-11-edge-rails-and-win32-compliant/54930/3 "2006-03-15T16:13:36Z")
Hi Zed I am about to try Mongrel on windows and hope to use it in production for a project. Is it possible to use Mongrel with iis? If so is there any information on how to? Sorry in advance if this is a stupid question!! Thanks Fraz ---
**Author:** ![Zed\_S](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/z/da6949/32.png) [@Zed\_S](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Zed_S)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2006, 11:24pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/mongrel-web-server-0-3-11-edge-rails-and-win32-compliant/54930/4 "2006-03-15T23:24:20Z")
Zed S. wrote: > TOP 10 REASONS TO USE MONGREL This looks great! I’ve been checking out the Mongrel pages and it looks like a great project. I was curious … is anyone using this in production right now, or is it (as the version number suggests) not quite ready for that? If you’re using it in production, how is it faring? I’m having some problems with FCGI (on a specific machine that’s admittedly configured kind of oddly) and I’d love to try an alternative, but only if it’s something that’s known to be able to keep running under at least a modest load for a reasonable amount of time (certainly more than the 2 days I’m experiencing with FCGI right now; I’ll post an update if my attempted fixes seem to do better). Jen ---
**Author:** ![Zed\_S](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/z/da6949/32.png) [@Zed\_S](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Zed_S)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2006, 9:10pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/mongrel-web-server-0-3-11-edge-rails-and-win32-compliant/54930/5 "2006-03-22T21:10:29Z")
In my experience, Ruby + Rails runs dog slow on Windows. I get roughly 4 to 8 req/second on Windows with either Apache + FCGI, Light + SCGI, or Mongrel. I was able to get 19 req/sec with Apache+FCGI but I had to use 4 dispatchers and I had to make sure that my shebang line in dispatch.fcgi called rubyw instead of ruby. I figure if you can get 6 req/second, you’ll be fine for light-traffic sites. I’ve asked this question before, but is there anything that can be done to speed up Ruby on Windows? Even running console or irb takes a lot longer than it does on Linux, ---
**Author:** ![Zed\_S](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/z/da6949/32.png) [@Zed\_S](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Zed_S)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2006, 8:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/mongrel-web-server-0-3-11-edge-rails-and-win32-compliant/54930/6 "2006-03-22T20:55:03Z")
Like others here, I’d like to start using Mongrel for a production application. I’m currently planning to run several instances behind LighTPD as outlined in the Mongrel documentation. By far, this is the easiest method I’ve found to serve up a Rails App on Windows (after trying many other approaches with FCGI, etc). Awesome work, Zed! I’m kind of curious what others are seeing when running httperf benchmarks against the LighTPD/Mongrel setup. I’m getting results on Windows that seem pretty low. I configured a simple “Hello, world!” Rails app and ran it on three different setups using httperf to benchmark the response rate. Mac OS X 10.4.4 (1.33Ghz G4, 768MB RAM), using Locomotive (LighTPD/FCGI): 8.5 requests/second Kubuntu 5.10 (1.6Ghz AMD Sempron 64, 1GB RAM), using ruby 1.8.4, LighTPD/Mongrel: 16.6 requests/second Windows XP SP2 (3Ghz Intel P4, 1GB RAM), using ruby 1.8.4, Cygwin/LighTPD/Mongrel: 0.8 requests/second Obviously, all three setups are wildly different – these are just what I have access to in the development environment. Even so, It seems _really_ odd that the Windows numbers would be so low. Is there something I’m missing? Rails is the same version on all three setups, as is the LighTPD config. The only thing I can think of that might be causing the slowdown is Cygwin. I’d be much obliged for any insights. FWIW, I’m running httperf using the following command: httperf --port 3000 --server 192.168.x.x --num-conns 300 --uri /test /test, of course, is the little “Hello, world” rails app. ---
**Author:** ![Zed\_S](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/z/da6949/32.png) [@Zed\_S](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Zed_S)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2006, 6:02am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/mongrel-web-server-0-3-11-edge-rails-and-win32-compliant/54930/7 "2006-03-24T06:02:37Z")
Yes, I’ve been carefully scrubbing the Mongrel code and testing performance on all of them. The unofficial status right now is this: Linux: Damn fast, compared to WEBrick. FreeBSD: Damn fast, compared to WEBrick, slightly slower than Linux. MacOSX: Faster than webrick, still slow as dirt compared to Linux. Win32: Marginally faster than webrick, some people report webrick faster. With Win32 and OSX I’m seeing if just recompiling ruby improves things the way it did for FreeBSD. Also the latest pre-release of Mongrel may (or may not) improve things further for people. If you’d like to try the pre-release (which has oodles of features, check the Configurator rdoc for a taste) try this: $ gem uninstall mongrel $ gem uninstall gem\_plugin $ gem install mongrel --source=[http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/releases/](http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/releases/) And you’ll be able to run your tests again to get an idea of how this release impacts it. Let me know if it’s worse or better. The main advantage though of Mongrel on win32 is that it’s dead dead dead easy to setup say 10 mongrel services on different ports and parallelize the hell out of them. There’s even an option to use CPU affinity to assign each Mongrel to a set CPU out of a group, which is something you don’t get with the POSIX systems. At some point though people need to start complaining about Ruby. As much as folks on the ruby-talk mailing list hate to talk about it they’re going to have to do something about Ruby’s speed. I’d say I’m pushing the envelope of high-performance Ruby pretty far and while I’m going to do everything humanly possible to make Mongrel fast all hell, it will really take people complaining to the _Ruby_ team to make things run much faster. In other words, I’m gonna try a few more tweaks, and possibly check-out if compiling on OSX and Win32 WITHOUT pthreads helps (like it did with FreeBSD). But, in the end, someone will just have to make Ruby faster. My only alternative is what I’m doing now which is writing critical parts in C. Anyway, try out the pre-releases and let me know if that improves things. Otherwise your metrics are about right with the win32 metric being _way_ lower than what I see. Zed A. Shaw > **[Zed A. shaw](https://zedshaw.com/)** > > Personal essays and writings by Zed A. Shaw.