# Noob ques:50mb of memory on mongrel and LightTPD w/ FastCGI

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/noob-ques-50mb-of-memory-on-mongrel-and-lighttpd-w-fastcgi/81717>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [January 11, 2007, 9:09pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/noob-ques-50mb-of-memory-on-mongrel-and-lighttpd-w-fastcgi/81717 "2007-01-11T21:09:19Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![koloa](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/k/4bbf92/32.png) [@koloa](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/koloa)\
**Post date:** [January 11, 2007, 9:09pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/noob-ques-50mb-of-memory-on-mongrel-and-lighttpd-w-fastcgi/81717/1 "2007-01-11T21:09:19Z")

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with 50mb memory dedicated to a small - medium application…what is  
considered small to medium?

i guess i am trying to think of it as how many requests to the  
application per minute can a application with 50mb safely handle? lets  
say the request is a basic ‘get’ from the db with no db relationship or  
calculation… like a site such as imageshack where users just ‘get’ the  
photo. how many of these gets per minute can a 50mb memory handel? how  
is mongrel vs lightTPD w/ fastCGI compare to in speed?

thanks

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**Author:** ![koloa](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/k/4bbf92/32.png) [@koloa](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/koloa)\
**Post date:** [January 11, 2007, 9:35pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/noob-ques-50mb-of-memory-on-mongrel-and-lighttpd-w-fastcgi/81717/2 "2007-01-11T21:35:13Z")

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koloa wrote:

> with 50mb memory dedicated to a small - medium application…what is  
> considered small to medium?
> 
> i guess i am trying to think of it as how many requests to the  
> application per minute can a application with 50mb safely handle? lets  
> say the request is a basic ‘get’ from the db with no db relationship or  
> calculation… like a site such as imageshack where users just ‘get’ the  
> photo. how many of these gets per minute can a 50mb memory handel? how  
> is mongrel vs lightTPD w/ fastCGI compare to in speed?
> 
> thanks

koloa,

An useful little app that helps you test request performances is httperf  
([http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/linux/httperf/](http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/linux/httperf/)), you can do things such  
as

httperf --hog --server YOUR\_SERVER --num-conn 100 --rate 10 --timeout 5

Which creates 100 connections to your host at a fixed rate of 50 per  
second, sends a request, receives the reply, closes the connection, and  
then prints some performance statistics. And to see what your server is  
capable of handling just play with the number of connections, etc.

–  
Thiago J.  
acts\_as\_solr =\> [http://acts-as-solr.rubyforge.org](http://acts-as-solr.rubyforge.org)

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![koloa](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/k/4bbf92/32.png) [@koloa](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/koloa)\
**Post date:** [January 11, 2007, 10:44pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/noob-ques-50mb-of-memory-on-mongrel-and-lighttpd-w-fastcgi/81717/3 "2007-01-11T22:44:08Z")

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hello Thiago, thanks for the link. i will look into it.