RoR alternative to mod_deflate

Hey Everyone,
I’m experiencing the following general problem. I have a single
instance
of mongrel on a shared hosting environment. I’m just a hobbyist so I
don’t
want to have to spend too much on hosting. Some of the files I’m
serving
through rails, noteably, the sitemap.xml, are relatively large. (I also
realize I should be serving that directly from apache, but thats not the
point =) It is my understanding that my one mongrel instance will be
consumed while the actual bytes of the served file are being sent over
the
wire, correct? In order to cut down on this time, I would like to use
mod_deflate (or a similar technology). My hosting providor doesn’t
support
mod_deflate. Does anyone know of a ruby on rails plugin that can
compress
my outgoing files? Or is this a problem that I shouldn’t need to worry
about because I’m misunderstanding how mongrel servers works.

Thanks,
Jim

Your Mongrel is blocking as long as Rails is generating the request –
not as long as it’s transferring the request over the write. That’s
actually multi-threaded.

While there might be a Mongrel handler for doing gzip or deflate
compression (I’m not sure), in this case you could also look into Ruby’s
Zlib to gzip your sitemap as sitemap.xml.gz. That’s supported by the
Sitemap standard.


Roderick van Domburg
http://www.railscluster.nl