Rails Stability

I have been away from Rails for a year now, but I have been maintaining
a site which runs on rails. It’s still hosted on textdrive served by
lighttpd with fastcgi. There’s something inherently wrong with fastcgi
and file uploading. Something about an end of line issue, but mongrel
kept dieing too.

The site keeps on crashing, so I have scripts running that basically
restart the webservice every so often, but that’s just unacceptable for
more serious work. I can’t go to a client and explain what the error
was. They don’t care.

The site uses RMagick to resize images and does some basic file
uploading. I have been in the PHP world for a year now, and I feel that
PHP is much more stable and portable than Rails. I am at a loss at
finding any good reasons to choose Rails, other than I like the Ruby
language.

Rails is not as portable as PHP. The sites are generally slow because
they require a bunch of CPU and shared environments don’t have the
resources. My compromise so far is that Rails is very demanding for
small projects.

Do you know of any reasons that makes Rails well suited for small
projects and I don’t mean microsites or brochure sites.

Never had stability issues with Rails I haven’t introduced with my own
code, but your mileage may vary.

On Nov 16, 8:20 pm, Roland M. [email protected]

Sounds like FCGI and RMagick are causing your issues. I’d have to
know a little more exactly what your issues are, but that combination
seems rather deadly in a limited resources environment.

–Jeremy

On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 8:20 PM, Roland M.
[email protected] wrote:

was. They don’t care.
small projects.

Do you know of any reasons that makes Rails well suited for small
projects and I don’t mean microsites or brochure sites.

Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.


http://jeremymcanally.com/
http://entp.com/

My books:

http://humblelittlerubybook.com/ (FREE!)

That would be my first thought is that his ancient setup (in the sense
of how fast things move in technology) might be causing more problems
and something more “modern” might help him out. My recommendation for
mod_rails stems more from his talk about portability than anything
else and I just worked on getting it set up on my server last night.

On Nov 16, 9:18 pm, “Jeremy McAnally” [email protected]

The textdrive server has rails 1.1.6 and mongrel 1.0.1 … so yeah, it’s
a bit out of date. I have set up mod_rails on my own, but it seems that
it too has had (or has) stability issues:
http://geek.littleredstring.com/15-phusions-mod_rails-not-so-hot-according-to-railsplayground
http://geek.littleredstring.com/32-mod_rails-railsplayground-back-on

I am a bit disappointed that Rails has been around for more than 4 years
and it still needs crutches. I find it a bit hard to go to my IT team
and ask for something that’s unstable or questionable.

However, I am willing to consider moving the site somewhere where it’s
more likely to be stable. It was rather interesting to see that
dreamhost is using mongrel as their webserver even though it seemed like
they liked mod_rails sometime in late 2007 - early 2008.

Dreamhost are using mod_rails with great success actually. You can
deploy with Mongrel, but they much prefer you to use Passenger.

Don’t let one blog entry from some random guy turn you away. I
guarantee I can find just as many entries about the crappy stability
of mod_php, ASP.NET or any other web technology you can think of.

–Jeremy

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 9:43 AM, Roland M.
[email protected] wrote:

However, I am willing to consider moving the site somewhere where it’s
more likely to be stable. It was rather interesting to see that
dreamhost is using mongrel as their webserver even though it seemed like
they liked mod_rails sometime in late 2007 - early 2008.

Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.


http://jeremymcanally.com/
http://entp.com/

My books:

http://humblelittlerubybook.com/ (FREE!)

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 7:43 AM, Roland M. <
[email protected]> wrote:

and ask for something that’s unstable or questionable.

However, I am willing to consider moving the site somewhere where it’s
more likely to be stable. It was rather interesting to see that
dreamhost is using mongrel as their webserver even though it seemed like
they liked mod_rails sometime in late 2007 - early 2008.

Hi, I have an account with dreamhost and one has the option to use
fastcgi
or mod_rails.Also, it has worked great for me. Next, every hosting
company
doesn’t have identical config
issues as the railsplayground. In any case, it’s good that there’s a
company that’s making
it easier to deploy rails application and they support their product.
Lastly, I wish you all the
best in find a hosting company that fit your needs.

Good luck,

-Conrad

On Nov 17, 9:48 am, “Jeremy McAnally” [email protected]
wrote:

Dreamhost are using mod_rails with great success actually. You can
deploy with Mongrel, but they much prefer you to use Passenger.

Don’t let one blog entry from some random guy turn you away. I
guarantee I can find just as many entries about the crappy stability
of mod_php, ASP.NET or any other web technology you can think of.

Don’t let that one blog entry turn you away. Like Jeremy said, a lot
of stuff can cause instabilities, including configuration. I would
search around for some hosts and see which ones are having the
greatest luck with mod_rails (or another config) and maybe even think
about running your own virtual server somewhere just for the fun.

That was a good read thank you.

Frederick C. wrote:

On 17 Nov 2008, at 16:09, Bobnation wrote:

Don’t let that one blog entry turn you away. Like Jeremy said, a lot
of stuff can cause instabilities, including configuration. I would
search around for some hosts and see which ones are having the
greatest luck with mod_rails (or another config) and maybe even think
about running your own virtual server somewhere just for the fun.

eg see
http://www.loudthinking.com/posts/30-myth-1-rails-is-hard-to-deploy
All the 37signals stuff will be moving to mod_rails soonish

Fred

On 17 Nov 2008, at 16:09, Bobnation wrote:

Don’t let that one blog entry turn you away. Like Jeremy said, a lot
of stuff can cause instabilities, including configuration. I would
search around for some hosts and see which ones are having the
greatest luck with mod_rails (or another config) and maybe even think
about running your own virtual server somewhere just for the fun.

eg see
http://www.loudthinking.com/posts/30-myth-1-rails-is-hard-to-deploy
All the 37signals stuff will be moving to mod_rails soonish

Fred

Frederick C. wrote:

On 17 Nov 2008, at 16:09, Bobnation wrote:

Don’t let that one blog entry turn you away. Like Jeremy said, a lot
of stuff can cause instabilities, including configuration. I would
search around for some hosts and see which ones are having the
greatest luck with mod_rails (or another config) and maybe even think
about running your own virtual server somewhere just for the fun.

eg see
http://www.loudthinking.com/posts/30-myth-1-rails-is-hard-to-deploy
All the 37signals stuff will be moving to mod_rails soonish

Fred

I run Nginx+Thin each in its own virtual machine. My Thin virtual
machine only crashed once, but I can’t tell you why, anyway it was
simply a matter of restarting the VM. Probably a memory leak somewhere
in the code.

Your “code” is past being “old” in ruby and rails terms.
Almost everything has been updated/fixed and resolved.
I’ve got production sites that have been running for 6 months, with
a reboot at most once a month. (On windows). On linux,
no problem at all. Update and run it on passenger.

I run code on windows and linux, and find the portability is great.
Long with running it over half a dozen different databases.

Php is Not portable, nor stable from my past projects.

On Nov 18, 1:04 am, Fernando P. [email protected]