# What are your experiences with Rails production stability? **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [January 8, 2008, 4:36pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/what-are-your-experiences-with-rails-production-stability/125363 "2008-01-08T16:36:39Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Java](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/898d66/32.png) [@Java](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Java)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2008, 4:36pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/what-are-your-experiences-with-rails-production-stability/125363/1 "2008-01-08T16:36:39Z")
Hi, Where I work we’re planning the development of a web-based collaboration tool. We are currently trying to figure out which kind of framework would be the best for our purpose and have nailed the choices down to Django and Rails. While we’re all pretty convinced that Rails serves our needs better, there are some serious concerns about its production performance. I DO NOT WANT THIS THE BECOME ANOTHER RAILS VS. DJANGO DEBATE but would instead just like to hear some EXPERIENCES WITH RAILS DEPLOYMENT. Problems or success stories, some numbers would be great but I understand if you can’t provide those. What I’m especially interested in are the rumors of rails deployments (apache2/mod\_proxy\_lb/mongrel) being so unstable that multiple restarts a day are required and the amount of traffic that can reasonably be served from a single, average server or a combination of 2 servers (app and db). The app will probably stay small scale for the near future but there will be no (or not many) paying users either so the popular (and in the presence of paying users perfectly reasonable) answer of just adding more hardware doesn’t apply as easily here. Links to other resources on these topics are welcome as well of course. Thanks Jan ---
**Author:** ![Java](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/898d66/32.png) [@Java](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Java)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2008, 4:48pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/what-are-your-experiences-with-rails-production-stability/125363/2 "2008-01-08T16:48:22Z")
On 8 Jan 2008, at 15:35, Java wrote: > I DO NOT WANT THIS THE BECOME ANOTHER RAILS VS. DJANGO DEBATE but > would instead just like to hear some EXPERIENCES WITH RAILS > DEPLOYMENT. Problems or success stories, some numbers would be great > but I understand if you can’t provide those. > > What I’m especially interested in are the rumors of rails deployments > (apache2/mod\_proxy\_lb/mongrel) being so unstable that multiple Well I can only talk about our apps, but I don’t recall us ever having to restart (outside of our regular updates) any bits of our servers Fred ---
**Author:** ![Java](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/898d66/32.png) [@Java](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Java)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2008, 7:16pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/what-are-your-experiences-with-rails-production-stability/125363/3 "2008-01-08T19:16:33Z")
On Jan 8, 2008, at 7:35 AM, Java wrote: > What I’m especially interested in are the rumors of rails deployments > (apache2/mod\_proxy\_lb/mongrel) being so unstable that multiple > restarts a day are required and the amount of traffic that can > reasonably be served from a single, average server or a combination of > 2 servers (app and db). The app will probably stay small scale for the > near future but there will be no (or not many) paying users either so > the popular (and in the presence of paying users perfectly reasonable) > answer of just adding more hardware doesn’t apply as easily here. I have a bunch of Rails apps out there – admittedly relatively low volume: One has been running for over a year without a restart (Apache proxying to mongrel/pound) One has been running for over two years and the client has had no change requests (Apache proxying to lighttpd/fcgi) Two only restart when I do a code pushes and have been live for (respectively) 18 months and 13 months (Apache/mod\_proxy\_balancer) So my deployment scenarios are all over the map, but they are all surviving what’s hitting them. I endured some pain getting deployment right for the first project, but all have been smooth since. YMMV ---
**Author:** ![Java](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/898d66/32.png) [@Java](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Java)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2008, 5:14pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/what-are-your-experiences-with-rails-production-stability/125363/4 "2008-01-08T17:14:07Z")
I know of many Rails apps that have been running for months without restarts. I also know that some hosts have to bump Rails apps every 20 minutes because they leak memory. My suspicion is this has to do with coding proficiency and gems / plugins / libraries used. You know, the same problems any language has. Rails is newer than PHP or Java, so it’s had to go through some deployment growing pains. It also comes down to available resources. Rails is expensive in terms of memory. 25 to 100 MB memory usage per instance of Mongrel. If you try to run Mysql, apache, and four mongrel instances on a 128mb vps, you will probably have some downtime if you get any significant load. A single instance of Mongrel can only handle one request at a time. That’s why you have more than one. Sounds scarier than it is, but because of that, a Rails app requires more resources to host than a PHP app. It’s a tradeoff right now. I can afford extra hosting if I can get my projects done in half the time. (I say half the time, and that’s my measurement. Looking back at similar projects I’ve done in ASP and PHP, Rails typically lets me get them done twice as fast), The deployment book ([Pragmatic Bookshelf: By Developers, For Developers](http://www.pragprog.com/titles/fr_deploy)) is a good start to getting something production-worthy going. The authors are all also great guys (shameless plug). You are hearing a lot of rumors about Rails’ stability. I can assure you that if it wasn’t stable, people wouldn’t have stuck around this long. We have a vested interest in making it work 🙂 Good luck! ---
**Author:** ![Java](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/898d66/32.png) [@Java](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Java)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2008, 9:28pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/what-are-your-experiences-with-rails-production-stability/125363/5 "2008-01-08T21:28:46Z")
Jan, We haven’t had any problems either but I think it really depends on your hardware resources and what deployment stack you use. That is where it can get tricky as there are so many but there are a few good best practices well documented on the web. I can highly recommend LiteSpeed, even the free version, as it has had great performance, easy setup and simple to maintain/monitor (web based). We haven’t had to restart once in the last year and it takes very little resources and offer very good performance. It has made deployment and management simple since all moving parts are in one place. Though it is a bit more involved in the setup and management arena, nginx + mongrel/evented\_mongrel are an excellent performance combination as well. Plus its open-source.