[Rails] [ANN] Mongrel HTTP Library 0.2.0 (Fast And RubyForgified)

[Tom Mornini]

On Jan 31, 2006, at 9:22 PM, Zed Shaw wrote:

> On Jan 31, 2006, at 9:15 PM, Ben Myles wrote:
>
>> Even though Mongrel will probably never be as fast as lighttpd  
>> serving
>> http requests, the bottleneck will be Rails itself, and Mongrel  
>> should
>> be able to keep ahead of that.
>
> This is the biggest problem with performance in any of the Ruby web  
> app
> frameworks.  No matter how fast I make Mongrel, at some point it's  
> gotta
> run Rails/Camping/Nitro and then things just crawl.  The advantage of
> Mongrel is it will at least remove most overhead, and I'm shooting to
> have some wicked dynamic caching in there, so it should be able to  
> help
> with the performance problems.

Not sure I understand you Zed.

Do you mean that Mongrel will be slower than Apache/Lighttpd + FCGI/ 
SCGI + Rails
or do you mean that anything involving Rails is slow?

I'm sure that it will always be slower than Apache/Lighttpd + FCGI/ 
SCGI, and I'm
also sure that it doesn't need to be fantastically slower due to  
small amount of
HTTP processing -vs- Rails work, as pointed out by Rafael Szuminski.

But...that's a problem that will likely resolve itself in one or more  
of the
following manners:

   1) Rails performance enhancements
   2) Ruby performance enhancements
   3) Faster hardware :-)

In other words, I don't see performance relative to Apache/Lighttpd +  
FCGI/SCGI
as the most important problem. Instead, I see the complexity of  
installing
Apache/Lighttpd + FCGI/SCGI as a problem much more in need to  
solving. Why not
make Mongrel a special purpose Rails web server, capable of  
development and
production modes, and eliminating the need for FCGI + SCGI entirely!

I think that if you could create a very specialized HTTP server that  
would be
capable of serving 80% of the commercial web sites created in RoR  
(from a
performance perspective, that is...single server or virtual server  
for everything),
and make it as easy to setup and run as WEBrick is currently, then  
it's not hard
to imagine Mongrel replacing (or augmenting) WEBrick in the Rails  
distro, and many
thousands of Rails applications running on Mongrel over the next  
several years.

If it's "fast enough", and simple to install, then it will get a lot  
of use.

-- 
-- Tom Mornini