[Ruby] Good alternatives to Mongrel?

[Scott Windsor]

On Jan 6, 2008, at 12:17 AM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

> Michael T. Halligan wrote:
>> After reading Zed Shaw's homophobic, bigoted rant last week, I'm not
>> terribly interested in using this guy's software. Are there any
>> passable alternatives to Mongrel out there?
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>
> After reading all the political *and* technical responses to this
> question, I'm really wondering now -- just what *is* the bottleneck  
> in a
> Rails server? Politics aside, Zed and some others went through some
> amazing contortions, tweaks and hacks to get Mongrel robust and fast.
>
> Overall web application server performance obviously depends on the
> application -- how big the model is, how many different URLs, how  
> chatty
> the application is over the network, database design, etc. But I just
> can't imagine the core web server part of it being a major bottleneck.

It really depends on your application and what it's doing and how  
often it's doing it.  Parallelizing your workers allows you to handle  
more simultatinous requests.  This happens to be a common bottleneck  
when your site gets more traffic.  Most rails applications use the  
database pretty heavily, so that also becomes a common bottleneck.   
But by no means are these guidelines that work for all applications,  
or may even be specific to your application.  Performance and load  
testing are the best way to see how your application can handle a  
simulated load, and then tune and tweak from there.

- scott