Number of apps on one server

Rails
#1

Hi,

If I were make small apps in rails such as personal blogs etc I read a
post saying that I would only be able to host around 30-40 on a
dedicated server as opposed to around 300 if they were wirtten in PHP.

I was wondering if you would have a similar problem if you used
django.

Cheers

#2

If I were make small apps in rails such as personal blogs etc I read a
post saying that I would only be able to host around 30-40 on a
dedicated server as opposed to around 300 if they were wirtten in PHP.

I was wondering if you would have a similar problem if you used
django.

I don’t know anything about django, but… you’re above statement is a
little misleading…

While technically correct I suppose, it is wrong to assume that you
could
run 300 simultaneous PHP apps on that same hardware.

Usually when someone says what you’ve said above what they mean is that
your apps are small, little used… so by using PHP you can “over sell”
the hardware since most of the time no one is requesting pages anyway
and
if they aren’t, the server doesn’t have any resource usage as PHP isn’t
standing around waiting for a request.

With Rails, this isn’t true. Rails is persistent so even if you’re not
actively serving requests, the rails framework is still loading taking
up
RAM.

However.

If you’re app makes good use of page caching (as does mephisto/typo)
and
you use a webserver such as litespeed (i believe fcgi can do this as
well)
that can shutdown the rails instances after a certain amount of
inactivity, then you could host even more apps as 99% of the requests
will
be to static HTML which your web server can handle without loading Rails
at all.

I have a personal blog and a small site for a friend… neither of which
gets hardly any traffic. I don’t track it much, but I hardly ever see a
rails process running on my box as things are either cached or no one is
using them.

Anyway, just something to keep in mind…

-philip