From: Kirk Haines <khaines@...>
Date: 2004-10-11T21:39:32+09:00
Subject: Re: overhead of WEBrick served http?

On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 21:14:41 +0900, Martin Pirker wrote

> b) probably someone already compared this to other http server
>    interfaces (fastCGI?), if I do only the request rendering
>    in Ruby and http stuff by pure C server, would this be
>    much faster?

I can tell you what I have found with IOWA.  Using it via fcgi and mod_ruby 
delivers very close to identical performance.  Using it under Webrick 
delivers about 2/3rds the performance of using it via Apache.  IMHO those 
are pretty surprisingly good numbers.

Page load benchmarks are meaningless without knowing what the page being 
loaded/rendered looks like, so take this with a grain of salt, but what this 
means is that on old, non-dedicated hardware (800 Mhz PIII that also runs a 
complete KDE desktop environment), for a typical web page that is a few k in 
length, with some simple IOWA work mixed in, benchmarks run in the low 30s 
of pages/second via Apache with either mod_ruby of fcgi.  With Webrick, the 
same pages return in the low 20s/second.

I'm not sure about running Webrick in a production environment, but I have, 
overall, been impressed by its performance.


Kirk Haines