Another dry sysadmin/deployment related post. If any of you Ravelry people want to hear about something in particular, please leave a comment 
A few quick notes about how I’m actually running my app:
- Web server : nginx. I ran Apache for a while before I switched to nginx. Nginx uses far less resources under load and is simpler to configure and custom compile/update.
- App server proxying/load balancing: nginx’s proxy with the addition of Grzegorz Nosek’s upstream_fair module, which sends requests to the least busy app server. This makes a huge difference because requests won’t stack up as long as you’ve got plenty of cluster nodes… I’ve been having some small problems with the module ignoring hosts that it should be proxying requests to and I’ve needed to reload the nginx configuration from from time to time. (This module is still beta)
- App server: Mongrel 1.1.x. It’s not perfect, but what else is there? (keep reading)
- Other stuff: I was using Swiftcore’s Evented Mongrel patch but it has been unreliable with the latest Mongrel. I’m going to try out their latest updated version when I have a minute.
What else is out there?
A couple interesting Mongrel-replacing hopefuls recently popped up:
- Thin : Thin is the Mongrel parser + EventMachine + rack. Most of the talk and announcements happen over in the Google group. I’ve been following and tinkering with releases as they drop. Thin updates have been coming quickly and the whole effort looks promising.
- Ebb : Ebb is similar - Mongrel parser + libev + rack. It was announced a couple weeks ago.
Comments (4)
I kinda know the guy who wrote Ebb; most posting is going on at his blog, AFAIK: http://four.livejournal.com/ It includes some benchmarks showing Ebb kicking the ass of Mongrel, Evented Mongrel, and Thin by 2-3x in throughput; actually, Mongrel seems to fall off the bottom pretty early, but it looks like Thin and Evented are pushing 3x of it and Ebb is pushing 6x …
As usual, benchmarks are questionable, but at least the setup he’s using is public (open source) so I can’t complain about not knowing what he’s testing.
My wife absolutely adores Ravelry, and when I heard it was written in Ruby on Rails I became interested myself. I do web development, but that’s about all I do - I haven’t gotten much into the side of doing my own hosting, so these posts are fascinating. Keep them up!
You and I already sort of had a “feature creep” conversation a few months ago.. we just started Scrumming a few weeks ago at my new job and I think it could really work for you, organizationally speaking. You’re working on a TON of features, and I’m a paranoid organizer. I lose sleep thinking about you possibly being frazzled by everything going on. Scrum is good! Love live the scrum!
*uh. that last sentence is both “Love the scrum” and “Long Live the Scrum”.
Me type gud sumdai.