# Rails on IIS7 **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [October 12, 2007, 12:40am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-on-iis7/117002 "2007-10-12T00:40:46Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Drew](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/b19c9b/32.png) [@Drew](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Drew)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2007, 12:40am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-on-iis7/117002/1 "2007-10-12T00:40:46Z")
The upcoming IIS7 includes out of the box support for FastCGI. I’ve been trying to get Rails running directly under IIS for the past few days, and documenting my progress on the wiki: [http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowToConfigureIIS7](http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowToConfigureIIS7) The problem I have right now is that ruby.exe consistently crashes after a certain number of requests. The first 3 requests go through. On the 4th, ruby.exe faults on msvcrt-ruby18.dll and dies. I found that if I remove the call to prepare\_breakpoint in dispatcher.rb, it will succeed for the first 8 requests, and then fail on the 9th. At this point, it looks like it’s dying during the call to write\_recognize in routing.rb. The number of requests it takes to fail is always consistent. More details and debug traces are on the wiki page, under “ruby.exe crashing”. Any ideas or direction from Ruby gurus would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! Drew ---
**Author:** ![Drew](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/b19c9b/32.png) [@Drew](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Drew)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2007, 4:43am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-on-iis7/117002/2 "2007-10-12T04:43:52Z")
Hi Drew I am using ROR and I don’t use IIS. The recommended approach is Apache2.2x + a pack of mongrels ---
**Author:** ![Drew](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/b19c9b/32.png) [@Drew](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Drew)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2007, 4:45am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-on-iis7/117002/3 "2007-10-12T04:45:02Z")
Hi Drew I am using ROR in Windows 2003 server but I don’t use IIS. The recommended approach is Apache2.2x + a pack of mongrels ---
**Author:** ![Drew](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/b19c9b/32.png) [@Drew](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Drew)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2007, 11:40am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-on-iis7/117002/4 "2007-10-14T11:40:50Z")
Hi CCH, I realize there are lots of easier ways to get Rails working. The goal is to make this one work. =) What’s exciting about IIS7/FastCGI is that it makes it plausible to deploy Rails to an existing, standard Windows server environment, without a lot of special configuration. I don’t want the server admin to have to do anything more than run the 1-click Ruby installer. Site owners can freeze their own copy of Rails, and use web.config files to configure the FastCGI handler at the site or directory level. Anyway, I’ve been able to isolate the crashes a bit more. It seems that garbage collection triggered by fcgi\_handler.rb is causing the problem. Commenting out the GC calls seems to address the issue, although it’s not a good long-term solution. This is why I was only seeing the issue with FastCGI. If I add explicit garbage collection to one of my controllers, WEBrick and Mongrel will crash ruby.exe too. Windows Vista and Server 2008 have tightened restrictions on memory management, as a safeguard against buffer overflows and other memory exploits. Garbage collection works on simple Ruby test scripts, but not with whatever Rails is passing it. Are there any instructions around for compiling Ruby on Windows from source? I think building against the Vista SDK might help. ---
**Author:** ![Drew](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/b19c9b/32.png) [@Drew](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Drew)\ **Post date:** [October 17, 2007, 9:40pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-on-iis7/117002/5 "2007-10-17T21:40:05Z")
For anyone interested, this was resolved by compiling FastCGI against VC6 instead of VC71, to match Ruby and the rest of the extensions provided with the One-Click Installer. The wiki has been updated with details. ---
**Author:** ![Drew](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/b19c9b/32.png) [@Drew](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Drew)\ **Post date:** [October 15, 2007, 3:34pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-on-iis7/117002/6 "2007-10-15T15:34:56Z")
Drew: I’ve been working with Rails and IIS for about 2 years. I did some testing on the IIS FastCGI stuff back in January. I’ve never run into the problems you’re seeing, but I can tell you from experience with Rails that I would definitely _not_ recommend deployment of Rails via FastCGI on any system because of the architectural limitations. While it’s cool in theory to be able to deploy a Rails app within an existing IIS infrastructure, Rails apps are not like .Net apps. They are memory hungry, somewhat intensive processes. Using Apache and mongrels running as a service allows you to scale to more than one server much more easily. This is especially important when you consider the fact that Ruby itself runs extremely slow under Windows, often 10 to 20x slower, depending on the circumstances. I’ve submitted a chapter to the book “Deploying Rails Applications” which will outline several strategies for deploying on Windows, including one that allows you to graft an app onto IIS with ISAPI\_Rewrite. Your theory about recompiling Ruby is interesting… you might send a message to the Ruby list about that If you’re interested in further discussion, feel free to contact me. ---
**Author:** ![Drew](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/b19c9b/32.png) [@Drew](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Drew)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2007, 3:22pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-on-iis7/117002/7 "2007-10-18T15:22:50Z")
Hi Drew Well Done ! I do recall that Ruby fr Windows was compiled under VC6. ---
**Author:** ![Drew](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/b19c9b/32.png) [@Drew](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Drew)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2008, 10:11pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-on-iis7/117002/8 "2008-09-10T22:11:58Z")
Drew wrote: > For anyone interested, this was resolved by compiling FastCGI against > VC6 instead of VC71, to match Ruby and the rest of the extensions > provided with the One-Click Installer. The wiki has been updated with > details. The link to the binary files is now gone, any clue where we could get them? Thanks.