EDU 2.0 Web Hosting

We decided that our web hosting provider needed some deep experience with Ruby on Rails, and so we moved from GoDaddy to OCS Solutions. We started with a single managed dedicated server: dual Xeon HT 2.66 GHz with 2 GB RAM and 120GB SATA RAID-1. It's around $400/month, but the technical support is superb and the last thing we want to do is squander precious time on configuration and installation issues.

Once the server was ready, we uploaded a simple Ruby application to serve up the home page using Mongrel. It seemed rather slow, so we served up the same home page using Apache and saw a noticeable improvement. The next step is to serve up the application using Lighttpd and measure the difference. Based on what we've seen so far, I think it's likely we'll end up using Lighttpd instead of Mongrel as the hosting server.

If you want to experience the difference:

• Using Mongrel
• Using Apache

Comments

[Rahul]

Iam trying hard to decide betweeen the ROR, python& PHP frameworks for my web app.

do you think your performance issues could be because of ROR/Ruby ?

appreciate your insight and any comparisons that you may have.

[Harris Reynolds]

Have you looked at using Apache + Mongrel + mod_proxy? Using that approach Apache can act as a web server for static files and as a load balancer for a Mongrel cluster; one benefit to this approach is that you can easily add more app servers (boxes with Mongrel + your Rails app) as usage scales. If you go the Lighttpd route you'll eventually need some kind of load balancer. Of course if the site got really big you may need that with the Apache solution as well. I hear the main Lighttpd developer is adding mod_proxy support so that it can be used in the same type of configuration, but not sure when it will be released. Best of luck man!

[Nick]

Hi Graham

You might want to have a look at litespeed as well - http://litespeedtech.com/ and some feedback at http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2006/9/5/litespeed-web-server-2-2-released