From: Dan Janowski <danj@3skel.com>
Date: 2004-04-27T14:19:44+09:00
Subject: Re: How do I scale large Ruby web applications?


On Apr 26, 2004, at 03:41, Sascha Ebach wrote:
>
> In my understanding the biggest problem in scaling Ruby (cpu wise) is 
> that it doesn't have native thread support, yet. What this means in 
> terms of a web application is that if you only have let's say 30 
> concurrent users on a fairly new piece of Hardware this is not a 
> problem. But what happens if your site suddenly gets very popular and 
> you jump from 20 to 200 or even 2000 concurrent users? How do you 
> scale such a web app? If you were to program this web app in Java or 
> any other language which supports native threads you could simply 
> throw more cpus and ram at it. I am thinking of a blade server here. 
> The more users you get you simply stick another blade in your server 
> and have your piece of mind. As I understand it you cannot do 
> something like that with Ruby. Enter Distributed Ruby (DRb).
>
> As Martin Fowler states in his first law of distributed object design: 
> Don't distribute your objects! 
> <http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FirstLawOfDistributedObjectDesign>
>

Distributing objects is one thing, but using drb as a request/response 
and control protocol is what I am considering at the moment. I was 
thinking of FCGI, but it is all or nothing in the sense that it forces 
the whole hit service out of Apache. But a considerable amount of cgi 
processing is not session dependent and is more appropriate in the 
Apache side (I use mod_ruby). Separating non-web application logic from 
cgi/web processing is one way to efficiently distribute the load.

Dan