From: snacktime <snacktime@...>
Date: 2007-02-04T19:10:23+09:00
Subject: Re: Using fork to conserve memory

On 2/3/07, ara.t.howard@noaa.gov <ara.t.howard@noaa.gov> wrote:
> On Sun, 4 Feb 2007, Rob Sanheim wrote:
>
> >  mongrel is still the preferred choice for serving Rails.
>
> why?  can you elaborate?

Well there really aren't that many options to start with.   Mongrel
works and is actively maintained.  Most of the alternatives have  bugs
that just never got fixed, even though some of them like fastcgi or
mod_ruby are far better choices design wise.  The main problem with
mongrel isn't mongrel itself,  but how you have to use it.  You need a
cluster of mongrel processes running with a proxy server in front.
You have issues with proxy servers being able to detect hung mongrels
or sending more then one request at a time to a mongrel.  The proxy
servers that can handle those things don't support ssl, and in general
it's just more work to setup and maintain then it could be.

Threads aren't an option because even if rails was thread safe, you
couldn't use C extensions because of blocking issues, which means most
of the database drivers.  And rails makes heavy use of databases.

Chris