From: Brian Candler <b.candler@...>
Date: 2009-01-23T19:48:22+09:00
Subject: Re: Choosing the most appropiate Ruby version and programming model to develop a SIP server

I単aki Baz Castillo wrote:
> Hi, I need to do a choice between the various Ruby versions (1.8, 1.9, 
> JRuby,
> Rubinius...) and programming models (Reactor Model, Actor Model...) to 
> build
> a SIP (VoIP) server.
> 
> I've already started it and for now I've done a complete SIP grammar 
> parser
> using TreeTpo parser, but probably I must migrate to Ragel in order to 
> get
> more performance.

Go back one step.

You are concerned about performance before you've even written 
something. How critical is performance going to be to your finished 
product? If the answer is "very" then maybe Ruby is not the best 
platform in the first place. I'd suggest using Erlang instead: it's used 
in massive telephony systems, and has extremely good support for 
protocol handling.

You'll need to buy Joe Armstrong's Erlang book (pragprog.com), and then 
you can make do with the on-line OTP documentation and looking at other 
people's code (e.g. mochiweb and yaws, which are HTTP servers). I even 
have a vague idea there is an existing Erlang SIP stack you can use. Ah, 
here it is:
http://www.stacken.kth.se/project/yxa/

You can also hide Erlang very well. For example, couchdb and rabbitmq 
are both built on Erlang, but users don't see any of this.

However, if you have some external requirement which means you *must* 
use Ruby, then understand that you may be trading ease of development 
against final performance and stability.

Personally, I would start with the simplest possible implementation 
(e.g. using gserver.rb to accept incoming TCP connections in Ruby green 
threads), and get something working. Once you need to scale up, it 
should be pretty easy to refactor to some other model.
-- 
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