Mod_Rails Released - Post your Thoughts

Rails
1

Mod_Rails is out, so what do you think?

2

ChessMess wrote:

http://modrails.com/

Mod_Rails is out, so what do you think?

I think that I might give it a try out.

3

Let’s see:

  • Faster than mongrel, on par with thin
  • Thoroughly tested and profiled for stability
  • Two lines of installation and a small snippet of code in apache config
  • Free to use and completely open source

I would say this is an exciting day for rails.

4

So far so good. I like not having to deal with cleaning up after
mongrel.

I have to reconfigure my capistrano scripts to reflect this, but i like
what I see.

5

ChessMess wrote:

http://modrails.com/

Mod_Rails is out, so what do you think?

I added a .htaccess file to my app root containing:

RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^$ public/ [L] RewriteRule (.*) public/$1 [L]

So now i can drag and drop the whole app into the folder without
pointing the root to the public folder (one extra step less).

I really like it.

6

Great day for Ruby on Rails.

We do not have a single reason now to envy PHP or Asp.Net, when it comes
to deployment.

I am full of cheers…

lets see, what rubinius does with with such inspiration.

7

This looks great. Would one ever use this in a development/testing
environment?

Thanks

8

Exceptional! Any chance we’ll see a Windows executable, maybe
packageable
with Instant Rails?

Best regards,
Bill

9

John H. wrote:

I added a .htaccess file to my app root containing:

RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^$ public/ [L] RewriteRule (.*) public/$1 [L]

So now i can drag and drop the whole app into the folder without
pointing the root to the public folder (one extra step less).

I really like it.

John,

Would you mind explaining what you mean? If you still have to set up a
virtual host in your apache config, what step are you saving since you
have to define DocumentRoot? If you are talking about being able to use
the same domain and have the Rails app appear “under” it, such as

www.mydomain.com/my_rails_app

wouldn’t that require something like a prefix in the app so your
generated routes would be correct? I’m thinking of the situation where
you have to apps living next to each other like

www.mydomain.com/rails_app_1
www.mydomain.com/rails_app_2

and how you’d need a prefix in both apps for the routes to work.

I might be missing something, though. I’d really like to be able to
have many apps live under one domain easily.

Thanks,
Phillip

10

I think this is one of the best things to happen to RoR lately.

11

wowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww i seen this a day late… but still
wowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

anyone who has tried it… can post some reviews?

12

We have been testing mod_rails over the past 48 hours or so and have it
installed on our most recent shared server for clients to use. Thus far
we’re skeptical if it will be more stable than a Mongrel cluster in a
shared environment but it certainly works as expected; upload your files
and you’re done (and it’s speedy, too).

Testing with a fresh install of redmine-0.6 on RHEL5 w/ Apache 2.2.8,
Mongrel 1.1.4, ruby 1.8.6 PL114, passenger 1.0.1 we’ve noticed a few
things:

  1. The app fired up in a Mongrel instance uses 35MB RES.

  2. The app fired up with mod_rails loads an ApplicationSpawner (40MB
    RES), a rails instance (39MB RES), and a FrameworkSpawner (25MB RES).
    The FrameworkSpawner only seems to run if you have Rails gems frozen in
    the app.

  3. If the app hasn’t been hit within the RailsPoolIdleTime the
    ApplicationSpawner/RailsInstance/FrameworkSpawner all die away. The next
    hit takes a few seconds for these to load again (remind you of
    something?).

At this point for shared clients we’re still recommending Mongrel
clusters over mod_rails (Mongrels on average take less memory out of
your quota and are ‘always on’) but are happy to offer both. Let me
know if you’d like to see any further details on the above or have any
other questions.

Cheers,
~William
http://www.hostingrails.com
http://www.hostingrails.com/mod_rails_hosting

13

@William,

What about those with many different rails apps, all with low volume?
So for example, if I had 10 apps, (each with <5 visits per day) I
would need 10 mongrels. Using you example numbers, that is 350MB.
However, if I used mod_rails, and I had the same 350MB available,
would it share the available memory between only the running apps?
That would (in theory) make the running apps faster, after the initial
slow requets.

Thanks,
Paul

On Apr 13, 3:39 am, William Li [email protected]

14

Hi Paul, with <5 visits per day per app I don’t think you’d see much of
a functional difference overall between mod_rails and mod_fcgid; the
former may be more stable (hopefully) but the ladder takes much less
memory, is widely supported, and is therefore much less expensive.
Mod_rails was built for speed, stability, and robustness with ease of
deployment, but as of passenger-1.0.1 our tests have shown that for an
app with a steady stream of visitors this comes at the cost of requiring
more memory than the two most common methods of hosting Rails in a
shared environment combined. At the end of the day, it appears that if
all goes well mod_rails will be for those who won’t mind paying a lot of
RAM for a bit more performance and deployment freedom.

~William
http://www.hostingrails.com

DyingToLearn wrote:

@William,

What about those with many different rails apps, all with low volume?
So for example, if I had 10 apps, (each with <5 visits per day) I
would need 10 mongrels. Using you example numbers, that is 350MB.
However, if I used mod_rails, and I had the same 350MB available,
would it share the available memory between only the running apps?
That would (in theory) make the running apps faster, after the initial
slow requets.

Thanks,
Paul

On Apr 13, 3:39�am, William Li [email protected]

15

Just installed Passenger, and I love it. Works flawlessly with all of
my Rails apps. However, when pointing my browser to all of my apps, it
takes a while to load (around 30 seconds) but then it’s really fast
after that. Is this normal, do I need to make any optimizations, or is
it just because of my sluggish iBook?

16

Install and setup was easy. Production logs indicate rails performance
is faster.

Main problem I have right now is that static content (images, js files)
seem to be taking 2 to 3 longer to download than when I was using
Apache/Mongrel (measured using firebug’s net tab).

Anyone else seeing an issue with static content download speed?

17

William,

Could you have a look at
http://groups.google.com/group/phusion-passenger/browse_thread/thread/e6dc620227ed7b4c
and repeat your experiment ?

Passenger is designed to work best with GC enabled ruby patch
http://izumi.plan99.net/blog/index.php/2008/01/14/making-ruby’s-garbage-collector-copy-on-write-friendly-part-7
from the memory point of view. I’ll need to convince Hongli/Ninh to
make that information a bit more clear :slight_smile:

With GC patch, each rails application can share the framework code in
memory and that results in huge memory savings.

-Pratik

On Sun, Apr 13, 2008 at 11:39 AM, William Li
[email protected] wrote:

something?).
http://www.hostingrails.com/mod_rails_hosting

–
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

–
Cheers!

18

On Apr 14, 1:26 pm, Pratik [email protected] wrote:

William,

Could you have a look athttp://groups.google.com/group/phusion-passenger/browse_thread/thread…
and repeat your experiment ?

Hi.

Thanks for explanation this Pratik. I wanted to say the same thing but
you beat me to it. :slight_smile:

Passenger is designed to work best with GC enabled ruby patchhttp://izumi.plan99.net/blog/index.php/2008/01/14/making-ruby%E2%80%9…
from the memory point of view. I’ll need to convince Hongli/Ninh to
make that information a bit more clear :slight_smile:

With GC patch, each rails application can share the framework code in
memory and that results in huge memory savings.

-Pratik

We’re going to publish this work as “Ruby Enterprise Edition”. Because
of the amount of work that had to be put into Passenger’s release, we
haven’t had the time to do that yet. Please watch
www.rubyenterpriseedition.com
(or our blog) for updates.

Regards,
Hongli L. (phusion.nl)

19

It shares code even if I vendor Rails?

–Jeremy

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 7:26 AM, Pratik [email protected] wrote:

make that information a bit more clear :slight_smile:

  1. The app fired up in a Mongrel instance uses 35MB RES.

–
http://jeremymcanally.com/
http://entp.com

Read my books:
Ruby in Practice (Ruby in Practice)
My free Ruby e-book (http://humblelittlerubybook.com/)

Or, my blogs:

http://rubyinpractice.com

20

Mod Rails ist just great, the only problem i currently have is how to
setup
basic authentication so that you have to log in to get to the
application?

If I try the following:
<Directory “/var/rails/mdd/current/public”>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
AuthName “Login”
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /var/rails/mdd/.htpasswd
Require user mdd

Then only my static assets are password protected.

How can i solve this?

TIA
Andy