Deploying RoR - Advice seeked!

Rails
1

Hi everyone!

I am developping a Ruby on Rails website with a heavy calculation
component at the backend. The calculation module can take up to 30sec
to produce a result and therefore the queries can be extremely slow to
be answered.

I now want to deploy my website and I am having a hard time finding a
good setup for it. I’ve tried the following two options and I’ll
explain the problems I’ve had using them. I’m looking for suggestions
for either solving these problems or for a deployement environment
that would suit my needs.

Setup 1. Apache2
Problem: It seems that all the StdOut and StdErr are directly send to
apache, causing it to produce erroneous requests. Also all my logs are
therefore empty and it is not that great to find out about the general
status of the application or the errors that occur.

Setup 2: Apache2 + Mongrel cluster
Problem: Mongrel is not multithreaded and as I’ve stated earlier my
requests can take up to 30sec. So if I want to guarantee a fast
service for my users I’d need a ridiculous number of mongrels running.

I’ll be glad to give more precisions if needed and would appreciate
any suggestions or advice!

Thanks alot,
Laurent

2

On 3/30/07, [email protected] [email protected]
wrote:

Hi everyone!

I am developping a Ruby on Rails website with a heavy calculation
component at the backend. The calculation module can take up to 30sec
to produce a result and therefore the queries can be extremely slow to
be answered.

[…]

I’ll be glad to give more precisions if needed and would appreciate
any suggestions or advice!

Run that task in the background, using for instance BackgroundDRb
http://backgroundrb.rubyforge.org/.

Isak

3

Thanks a lot for this. I will definitely look into it since it seems
to be great solution for our problem.
About it, I see it’s version 0.2; has anyone experience with it and
can tell me a bit more about its stability/reliability?

4

Laurent,

I’ve used it to handle some slow jobs before and it has been great.
One recomendation I can give you is to try out Litespeed instead of
Apache or Mongrel. The performance is great and the admin interface
makes your life easier. Give it a try before trying backgroundDrb and
see how it goes.

Sincerely,

Adrian Marid

On 3/30/07, [email protected] [email protected]
wrote:

any suggestions or advice!

–
Adrian Esteban Madrid

5

Laurent,

Why don’t you extend your Ruby with a little C code. This can be a
great way to get a performance gain. The picaxe book has a great
chapter called Extending Ruby that talks all about it. It is Chapter
21 and starts on page 275. This will place your computation in
compiled C, and therefore will run much faster. Let me know if this
works for you.

Amos

6

Thanks Adrian!

A friend of mine actually pointed out Litespeed as a possible option
too and I am going to give it a try. Maybe even use it in conjunction
with backgroundDrb.

I will try this during this week and post the results I experience.

Laurent

7

Hi Amos,

Good suggestion. The problem with this computation phase is that an
important part (~70%) of the time is spent downloading data from
foreign sources and therefore cannot really benefit from your
proposition. I’ll have to see how much I can benefit from a rewrite of
the code in C.

I’ve had to postpone this deployement problem until now and I will
post the results I obtain with the different solution suggested soon.

Thanks to all of you!
Laurent

On Apr 2, 5:34 pm, “[email protected]” [email protected]

8

Another vote for backgroundrb for me.
As far as rewriting stuff to use C, you might want to check out Ruby
Inline http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubyinline/ Depending on the
size/complexity of your code you might find it useful.

Fred

9

Thanks Frederick!

I’m exploring the backgroundrb at the moment and will post soon (I
really will when I find a good solution :o)) the results I get.

Thanks for your pointer to the rubyinline project. It indeed seems
like it can be very useful. I’ve decided to profile my application and
see where the time is spent before rewritting anything in another
language. But if it turns out I have to rewrite some parts then I’ll
definitely consider this lib.

Laurent

On 16 avr, 13:05, Frederick C. [email protected]