Hello everybody, I’ve been lurking and reading for a while and I think
I’m about a month from my first live Rails app, which I’m happy about
I’m currently battling through a truck load of questions about server
set-up and back-end things so the first question I would like your
opinion on is:
Does anybody have any thoughts or experience with different base
distributions of Linux and Rails performance?
Does it make a difference?
Which of the following choices would you recommend for setting up the
ideal rails server environment: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Fedora Core
3, Debian or White Box Enterprise Linux 3?
(I’ve noticed on the lighttpd page, for example, that debian isn’t on
the list of ‘included’ distributions yet but am not sure if that means
it’s impossible to complie, can be compiled from the source RPM or just
makes it a bit more difficult).
I would recommend using Debian stable, with the necessary
daemons/servers compiled from source, if I have to choose from your
list. I guess you will not have any problems compiling lighttpd on
debian, if you have some experience in compiling stuff from source.
I would not recommend using the others: they are bloated with
unnecessary stuff, not mentioning fedora which is aimed primarily for
desktop use by the way. Unless you need or want to use the support
which comes with these enterprise distributions when purchased or have
no other option, my advice is to stay away from them.
However, I would recommend using a bsd (my choice is freebsd) in first
place. They are rock solid and scale somewhat better under heavy duty
than a linux distro. In my opinion, it’s a better platform
all-together when it comes to webhosting.
A lot of hosting companies (including mine) using freebsd for their
webservers, now with rails, lighttpd, fcgi and all the cool stuff,
without any problems for quite a long time now.
A lot of hosting companies (including mine) using freebsd for their
webservers, now with rails, lighttpd, fcgi and all the cool stuff,
without any problems for quite a long time now.
And if it is not a secret what is your company, so we can for example
host out rails stuff on it?
I didn’t mentioned it specifically because at this day, we are not
open to the public market regarding webhosting. We providing only
custom hosting environments for our contracted clients to whom we
develop sites, applications, etc, and there’s no need to start another
common hosting service beside the other million, already running
About the rails hosting. Unfortunately, we a hungarian based company
and at the moment we have only hungarian clients. Therefore my
international bandwidth is kinda limited, so it would make no sense
offering our services to international clients already.
However, I’m currently in the process to start in public rails
hosting, because Hungary - just as the rest of the world it seems -
are kinda lacking in this area. I’m confident that we can pull out
this start in approx. 2 months from now on, so I’ll keep you updated,
if interested.
(I’ve noticed on the lighttpd page, for example, that debian isn’t on the list of ‘included’ distributions yet but am not sure if that means it’s impossible to complie, can be compiled from the source RPM or just makes it a bit more difficult).
Hi Matthew,
I believe that this is because there are issues with gem which violate
the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) which Debian packages follow
pretty closely. This is in no way a show-stopper, and there are several
practical workarounds, so if you’re willing to be a tiny bit creative,
and slightly compromise your otherwise pure Debian installation,
everything should be okay.
In fact, I’m running RoR on Debian (sid) and have had nothing but joy. I
began by loading the Ruby 1.8 and 1.9, and Rails packages using apt, and
have since loaded and compiled RubyGems, which I’ve used to install a
few generators. Everything seems to be working, and if there’s a problem
I haven’t found it …yet.
I would recommend using Debian stable, with the necessary
daemons/servers compiled from source, if I have to choose from your
list. I guess you will not have any problems compiling lighttpd on
debian, if you have some experience in compiling stuff from source.
I would recommend the latest Ubuntu Breezy release, which is based off
of
Debian, as Debian doesn’t have a consistent release schedule while
Ubuntu
releases new stable versions every six months, so it’s probably easier
to keep
your system up to date with the latest development tools.
Thank you everybody, for all your thoughts. I think I will go with
Debian then and install everything from source.
Ezra, great tutorial, it covers most of what I want to do. I also had a
look at the rest of your blog and I especially liked the post about the
restructuring in rails of your newspaper site.
I will try and get started this week when I have a spare minute or two
and also record the steps to make a tutorial. I am quite new to linux
and things so I will try and answer lots of basic questions along the
way.
I would recommend the latest Ubuntu Breezy release, which is based off
regards
Justin
Justin,
What I’ve done is taken a rubygems package originally developed for
Debian,
recompiled it for Ubuntu, and use that to install gems. For reference,
the
original package you can find at
The cool thing about the way this particular package is packaged is that
it
installs all the gems into /var/lib/gems/1.8, so that you don’t get any
non-dpkg
managed files in /usr. Doing a ‘dpkg --purge’ on libgems-rb18 then just
deletes
this directory. Nice and clean.
Since you’re on PowerPC, I would recommend just downloading the source
for the
package and compiling it yourself. There’s probably architecture
specific stuff
inside the compiled gems package.
