# Setup Question **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [November 16, 2007, 10:29pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/setup-question/120437 "2007-11-16T22:29:26Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![syg6](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/439d5e/32.png) [@syg6](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/syg6)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2007, 10:29pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/setup-question/120437/1 "2007-11-16T22:29:26Z")
I was trying to use httperf to do some benchmarking on my server and the results were pretty dismal - very low connection /response rates and lots of 5xx values. While there was some other stuff running on the machine, its at least a dual core 2.6ghz with 6gb ram and it generally never goes above 1-2% cpu usage so there is a lot of slack. Its a (suse) LAMP machine with RoR running under a vhost. A coworker did the initial setup, but I’m looking to tweak things as they are starting to get a little slow for the users. The command I use in a start up script mongrel\_rails start -d -e production -p 3000 -n 8 -c /wwwroot/path I choose the n=8 from something I read over on [http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/index.html](http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/index.html) … can’t recall the exact page but there was an estimate for 8-12 processors. Figured it couldn’t hurt. also read a little about running a mongrel cluster [http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/docs/mongrel\_cluster.html](http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/docs/mongrel_cluster.html) and didn’t know if this would help reduce some of the congestion. ---
**Author:** ![syg6](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/439d5e/32.png) [@syg6](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/syg6)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2007, 11:00pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/setup-question/120437/2 "2007-11-16T23:00:16Z")
> The command I use in a start up script > mongrel\_rails start -d -e production -p 3000 -n 8 -c /wwwroot/path > > I choose the n=8 from something I read over on > [http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/index.html](http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/index.html) … can’t recall the exact page > but there was an estimate for 8-12 processors. Figured it couldn’t > hurt. Actually it can. [http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/docs/how\_many\_mongrels.html](http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/docs/how_many_mongrels.html) We found that 4 was our sweet spot. 5 was too many. -philip ---
**Author:** ![syg6](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/439d5e/32.png) [@syg6](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/syg6)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2007, 5:35am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/setup-question/120437/3 "2007-11-18T05:35:26Z")
Throwing httperf or ab at a single mongrel instance will give you an idea what the theoretical average request/response rate should be per server. And it would probably be just fine for a single user, right? But a single mongrel may not be serving up enough requests to give you the concurrency you need. In that case, you should load balance to a mongrel cluster using pound or pen or mod\_proxy\_balancer. See if firing up 3-5 mongrels and load balancing that way helps out. If you are still in “setup” mode, then you may be doing some premature optimization (I hate it when people say this to me :). You might want to get a good grasp on your performance bottlenecks, and then examine a combination of caching, serving static pages directly from Apache, alternate “light stacks” like merb to speed things up. ---
**Author:** ![syg6](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/439d5e/32.png) [@syg6](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/syg6)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2007, 3:37pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/setup-question/120437/4 "2007-11-19T15:37:58Z")
Steve R. wrote: > Throwing httperf or ab at a single mongrel instance will give you an > idea what the theoretical average request/response rate should be per > server. And it would probably be just fine for a single user, right? > But a single mongrel may not be serving up enough requests to give > you the concurrency you need. In that case, you should load balance > to a mongrel cluster using pound or pen or mod\_proxy\_balancer. See if > firing up 3-5 mongrels and load balancing that way helps out. Thanks for the tips. Yeah, the tuning page was the one where I got the 8 number from. I’ll be spending the morning playing around with the benchmarks to see what number works best. Since there is a load balancer, I’ll probably need to point at a single IP to do the testing rather then the balanced IP. Now, this is a little switch, but I was looking at the versions and my install is about a year old. I had read somewhere that rails v1.2 was actually slower then v1.1, but as the date on the article was a little old that may be fixed now. Would there be any issues from upgrading any of the following? Mongrel 0.3.13.4 1.1.1 rails 1.1.4 1.2.5 ruby 1.8.4 1.8.6 And one other clarification if you could - Can I run multiple mongrel processes without clustering? I’m interested in checking out the clustering ability, but was wondering exactly what it buys you.