Best web server for running a Rails site?

Rails
1

I heard about Mongrel and Webrick, but they are also interpreted right?
isn’t that going to be slow? I mean we know currently that Ruby
Interpreter itself is slow as turtle. And our web applications are in
Ruby already. So now we have rails, our application and the server being
executed at one time. That would be a lot of resource and execution time
per request.

Is there an alternative like using Apache or other Known web servers?

2

Go to the mongrel web site and read their documentation on deployment
options. You can use mongrel by itself, or with a front end web
server like Apache. It also goes into some details on the advantages
and disadvantages of each deployment option so you can make an
informed decision on what best fits your needs.

I would recommend doing your research before posting your own
speculations on what you feel are limitations in these technologies.
Some very smart people have put these tools together, and they are
very clear about what options you have. You just need to take to time
to look into them.

On May 7, 9:58 am, Mike H. [email protected]

3

You don’t use Mongrel by itself. You use a mongrel cluster with a
load balancer, like Apache. That takes the load of any static files
off of Ruby. Then there’s your app. The execution of an application
request dwarfs any work that Mongrel is doing. If 99% of a request is
application processing then it doesn’t matter if you switch from
Mongrel to an infinitely fast (magic) app server–you’ll still only
get 1% improvement.

There’s a lot of Rails performance hysteria out there right now, but
it’s important to remember that Ruby is only slow relative to other
languages, and not terribly slow at that. You don’t see people
running out and building web frameworks in C++ just because “Java is
slow”.

On May 7, 7:58 am, Mike H. [email protected]

4

On 07 May 2007, at 17:15, dasil003 wrote:

There’s a lot of Rails performance hysteria out there right now, but
it’s important to remember that Ruby is only slow relative to other
languages, and not terribly slow at that.

The benchmarks I’ve seen put Ruby at the slowest language out there
that anyone’s actually using. That said, slow is often relative to
what you’re doing, how you code it, and what other facilities you
use. Rails has a lot of mechanisms (caching, etc.) to help speed up
your app.

-faisal

5

Exactly, what is slow? My productivity has increased tenfold and the
performance is top-notch. Serving static files through Apache and
balancing the rest to a mongrel cluster is just a dream come true.

On 07 May 2007, at 17:15, dasil003 wrote:

There’s a lot of Rails performance hysteria out there right now, but
it’s important to remember that Ruby is only slow relative to other
languages, and not terribly slow at that. You don’t see people
running out and building web frameworks in C++ just because “Java is
slow”.

Best regards

Peter De Berdt

6

Another issue, that hasn’t yet been raised, is that if your Ruby code
is spending 90%+ of it’s time waiting on you SQL queries to return,
then the performance difference between Ruby and any other language
becomes irrelevant. In my experience this is true a very large
percentage of the time. Most of your performance tweaking will be
database related anyway.

7

On May 7, 2007, at 12:58 PM, Faisal N Jawdat wrote:

The benchmarks I’ve seen put Ruby at the slowest language out there
that anyone’s actually using. That said, slow is often relative to
what you’re doing, how you code it, and what other facilities you
use. Rails has a lot of mechanisms (caching, etc.) to help speed
up your app.

also

The Ruby performance issue is around execution speed. Threads won’t
particularly help with that, except insofar as they reduce the memory
footprint of the application server. It isn’t clear how much they’ll
help there, since a lot of the infrastructure will need to be
replicated anyway.

-faisal