Rails (3) server - what to use nowadays?

Question

I've been using Ruby Enterprise Edition and Passenger (for Apache, since I run Apache anyway for other things) for some time, but I'm wondering if there's a new trend about what to use on servers nowadays. For example I've heard about Thin, Unicorn... I also know that 1.9.2 is faster than REE, but I wonder about RAM consumption. I'd rather have it consume less RAM even at the expense of some speed.

Thanks for all advice.

Answer 1

If you want minimal memory you should try Thin. It does not have master worker as Unicorn or Passenger, thus uses less memory. Suppose you have a very small app that needs to run on a small VM, then you can use 1 thin worker + nginx. I ran several rails 3.2 apps using Thin+nginx+postgres on 256MB VMs without swapping.

Unicorn is faster but it needs a master worker. It's good if you want to run on Heroku, you can set it 2 or 3 workers and be within the 512MB limit.

If your app is very big and you have too many long running requests, I would check out jRuby and Thinidad/Torquebox.

I converted a few apps from MRI+Sidekiq to jruby+Trinidad+Trinidad_Scheduler. I get about 100-200 req/sec using a pool of 50 threads in a trinidad server!

What I like about jRuby is that you can combine everything on one Rails Server. You can put together on the same JavaVM the cache_store with EHcache, Scheduling, Background processing and real multithreading.

You don't need to run redis, memcached, resque or sidekiq separately.

Im not saying they are not good, I love sidekiq and resque, but you can decrease your complexity by combining everything on one process and have high concurrency.

A more advanced and Enterprise solution is Torquebox, it has support for clustering and is super scalable. But I've had problems with my app crashing on torquebox, so i'm sticking to Trinidad for now.

The disadvantages of jRuby? MEmory! A Trinidad server will use minimum 512MB, up to 2-3GB ram. Also, for Single Thread server, a single request from a rails app running Ruby-1.9.3 is about twice as fast as the same request on jRuby.

Another option is Puma, you can get full multithreading on MRI with puma. I myself could not get it stable enough on my apps.

So, it all depends on your requirements, memory usage, full threading and concurrency.

Apart from Passenger, have a look at Unicorn, Trinidad, Puma and Torquebox. Those seems to be the top rails servers right now.

There is an great book with an introduction of converting your Rails app to jRuby and deploy your app using several methods such as trinidad. http://pragprog.com/book/jkdepj/deploying-with-jruby

The Torquebox Documentation is amazingly good. It's very detailed and explains really good how to use all Torquebox features. http://torquebox.org/documentation/

I Hope that sharing my experience has helped.

Answer 2

Mike Lewis' link does a good job of comparing those different ruby servers. My personal experience has been with nginx/REE/Passenger and its been good. I haven't tried the others, so I can't comment on that.

However, I can speak on RAM usage. Your biggest savings of RAM will come from using 32-bit servers. In my experience (3x 3GB app servers), 64-bit REE/passenger processes took up to 2x as much RAM as their 32-bit counterparts. We saw a significant performance increase moving from 64 to 32 bit servers, everything else staying the same. Unless your application requires 64-bit, I would suggest running your application servers (not database) in 32-bit.

Answer 3

Passenger is still extremely strong, especially being REE will naturally support 1.9 in the near future. The fact that your application can crash, however it won't affect anything else on your machine is an amazing feature to have. Deploying code is extremely easy because the server will continue to accept connections, which means less frustration/stress for you.

However, in terms of comparisons:

Here is a great resource is check out various comparisons(including memory consumption) with all the new servers.

It compares Thin, Unicorn, Passenger, TorqueBox, Glassfish, and Trinidad:

http://torquebox.org/news/2011/03/14/benchmarking-torquebox-round2/

Answer 4

Passenger is still a very good choice to use so you are not behind the times or anything. It is also actively supported and has a very good development team that contributes a lot to the community. We have been using Unicorn and it has been very good. Our favorite functionality is to be able to upgrade apps/ruby/nginx without dropping a connection.