From: khaines@...
Date: 2006-10-19T23:20:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Is anyone using Ruby for 24/7 financial applications?

On Thu, 19 Oct 2006, John Baylor wrote:

> I know a lot of people are using ruby on rails for web apps, usually with
> Apache as the underlying app, but I don't know of anyone using ruby itself
> for a 24/7 application.  Yes, some people are using webrick as their web
> server but they don't necessarily lose $$$ if their personal web site goes
> down.
>
> I'm trying to talk my company into using ruby in a remote environment (a
> merchant's store) where it has to be solidly up 24/7 or the merchant will
> stop using our product.  We should be able to SSH to the box if we need to
> but we'd rather not need to.  While I have confidence that ruby can run in
> that environment, management would like to hear that someone else is already
> using it for a similar purpose.  Are they?

I am.

The other day I restarted the IOWA process for a web site that had been 
running 270 days without a problem.  I only had to restart it because of 
something dumb that I did.

On various servers I have a bunch of mutual fund sites, many of whom are 
very tense about even miniscule downtimes.  I have processes that act as 
middlemen, transfering information between a fund distributor and a fund. 
I have systems involved in business communications, data tracking and 
reporting, and a custom data storage and mining app that combines a destop 
utility, a daemon to receive data from the desktop utility, an engine to 
facilitate automatic OCR scanning of uploaded images, and a web interface 
(none of which relies on Apache for anything more than a proxy that does a 
decent job of serving static content, too).

I don't have downtime that is Ruby related.   I just don't.  I've been 
using Ruby for sites, apps, and software processes in production 
environments, for businesses, since spring of 2002.


Kirk Haines