CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsdeploymentserver
Dima Melnik
Dima Melnik

Reputation: 884

Ruby on Rails on few servers

I have a big application. One of the part of this is highload processing with user files. I decide to provide for this one dedicate server. There will be nginx for distribution content and some programs (non rails) for processing files.

I have two question:

  1. What better to use on this server? (Rails or something else, maybe Sinatra)
  2. If I'll use Rails how to deploy? I can't find any instruction. If I have one app and two servers how to deploy it and delegate task for each other?

ps I need to authorize user on both servers. In Rails I use Devise.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 33

Answers (1)

kobaltz
kobaltz

Reputation: 7070

You can use Rails for this. If both servers will act as a web client to the end user then you'll need some sort of load balancer in front of the two servers. HAProxy does a great job on this.

As far as getting the two applications to communicate with each other, this will be less trivial than you may think. What you should do is use a locking mechanism on performing the tasks. Delayed_job by default will lock a job in the queue so that any other works will not try and work on the same job. You can use callbacks from ActiveJob to notify the user via web sockets whenever their job is completed.

Anything that will take time or calling an external API should usually be placed into a background processing queue so that you're not holding up the user.

If you cannot spin up more than the two servers, you should make one of them the master or at least have some clear roles of the two servers. For example, one server may be your background processing and memcache server while the other is storing your database and handles your web sockets.

There are a lot of different ways of configuring the services and anything including and beyond what I've mentioned is opinionated.

Having separate servers for handling tasks is my preference as it makes them easier to manage from a Sys Admin perspective. For example, if we find that our web sockets server is hammered, we can simply spin up a few more web socket servers and throw them into a load balancer pool. The end user would not be negatively impacted from your networking changes. Whereas, if you have your servers performing dual roles outside of your standard Rails installation, you may find yourself cloning and wasting resources. Each of my web servers usually also perform background tasks on low-intermediate priority queues while a dedicated server is left for handling mission critical jobs.

Upvotes: 1

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