# RE: Mongrel + RubyOnRails + FileUploads = Problems? **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [May 3, 2006, 9:08pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-mongrel-rubyonrails-fileuploads-problems/94451 "2006-05-03T21:08:30Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![dacbo](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@dacbo](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dacbo)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2006, 9:08pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-mongrel-rubyonrails-fileuploads-problems/94451/1 "2006-05-03T21:08:30Z")
So I could run multiple mongrel instances on one server and use a proxy load balancer? Chris ---
**Author:** ![dacbo](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@dacbo](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dacbo)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2006, 10:32pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-mongrel-rubyonrails-fileuploads-problems/94451/2 "2006-05-03T22:32:13Z")
Yes. – – Tom M. ---
**Author:** ![dacbo](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@dacbo](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dacbo)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2006, 11:15pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-mongrel-rubyonrails-fileuploads-problems/94451/3 "2006-05-03T23:15:41Z")
Wait… this is kind of bad… if I understand this right… 1 dispatcher means that if someone uplaods a file, nobody else can use the site? So 2 dispatchers works until two people upload a file at the same time… so really, this is not going to scale well at all if you’re trying to do something like flickr. With that logic you’d need 100 dispatchers if you expected 100 users to be concurrently using your site to upload files. YouTube gets 25,000 submissions per day… does that mean Rails could never be used to build a site like that? I just can’t believe that’s the case. ---
**Author:** ![dacbo](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@dacbo](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dacbo)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2006, 3:26am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-mongrel-rubyonrails-fileuploads-problems/94451/4 "2006-05-04T03:26:37Z")
Hey Brian, On 5/3/06 5:12 PM, “Brian H.” [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > Wait… this is kind of bad… if I understand this right… > > 1 dispatcher means that if someone uplaods a file, nobody else can use the > site? Yep, for the time it takes Rails to process the uploaded file with cgi.rb. If you’ve got an insane amount of upload content then 1 won’t work at all. > So 2 dispatchers works until two people upload a file at the same time… so > really, this is not going to scale well at all if you’re trying to do > something like flickr. Yep, then there’s a delay. But, the story is a bit more complex. > With that logic you’d need 100 dispatchers if you expected 100 users to be > concurrently using your site to upload files. 100 concurrent users is an _insane_ number of actual people in the process queue. The thing to keep in mind is that you can’t measure users since that’s behavior dependent. You could have a site that users hit rarely, where 100 concurrent means you have billions of users. You could have a chat site like campfire where 100 concurrent could mean thousands. It all depends on user behavior. The real way to figure out what kind of req/sec equates to a concurrency level is to use simulation. There’s math methods using queuing theory that work decent if you need to figure your require concurrency before you build the system. If you have the system built already then you need to write a simulator tool or use an existing one that will perform a simulation against your live site. A key thing with this though is you can’t really use the results as a measurement of performance. It does tell you how well the site handles load, generally how fast that simulated process might be, and what kind of additional hardware you’d need. But, to really find out how to tune a particular part of the process you need to go back to performance measurements with a tool like httperf. > YouTube gets 25,000 submissions per day… does that mean Rails could never > be used to build a site like that? This is something else that’s kind of weird. I’m assuming most people here have a basic understanding of math but for some reason they throw out these kinds of measurements. Any “I get X per day” is really pretty useless since it doesn’t include a distribution. If you assume that this 25k is steady and average it out that’s like .29 req/second. No way that’s right since there’s probably some kind of statistical distribution for the requests. The measurement would have to be augmented with a peak measurement over a smaller period of time. For example, “YouTube get 25k submissions/day with a peak of 1400/hour and .38/second.” Then you start to get a bigger picture. Anyway, hope that clears some things up. The gist is that you can usually handle a lot more concurrent connections with lower numbers of backends then you think, but you need to run simulations to really determine this. Zed A. Shaw > **[Zed A. shaw](https://zedshaw.com/)** > > Personal essays and writings by Zed A. Shaw. [http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/](http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/)