Rails webserver research

Summary

• Unicorn’s deployment strategy is superior to Passenger’s, it allows upgrades of application code and even of the Unicorn binary itself without downtime. Oh yeah, and its also faster and uses less memory than passenger.
• Nninx seems to be easier to configure and its purported to be faster and use less memory than apache.

Side notes

• Thin is great for serving up tiny, fast requests, and has better memory usage than anything else.
• Passenger has some cases where it may periodically respond to some requests when its overloaded.

Server Benchmarking

• httperf
• autobench is a perl wrapper for httperf that adds features.
• OpenWebLoad
• apachebench
• LoadImpact is a pay-for service for testing servers.

References

Setup Guide for nginx and Unicorn

• 2010: http://techbot.me/2010/08/deployment-recipes-deploying-monitoring-and-securing-your-rails-application-to-a-clean-ubuntu-10-04-install-using-nginx-and-unicorn/
• 2011: http://brandontilley.com/2011/01/29/serving-rails-apps-with-rvm-nginx-unicorn-and-upstart.html

Passenger, Thin, Unicorn

• 2009: https://github.com/blog/517-unicorn
• 2010: http://snaprails.tumblr.com/post/489274578/ruby-web-servers-benchmark
• 2010: http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/03/unicorn-power.html

Info on Unicorn

• 2010: http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2010/everything-you-need-to-know-about-unicorn/

Info on Passenger (note the nginx graph)

• 2010: http://blog.phusion.nl/2010/10/18/phusion-passenger-3-0-0-final-released/

Web servers

• 2011: http://xenforo.com/community/threads/apache-vs-nginx-vs-lighttpd.12484/
• 2010: http://www.mariusv.com/nginx-vs-apache-1-0/
• 2010: http://serverfault.com/questions/143238/nginx-vs-apache-as-reverse-proxy-which-one-to-choose
• 2010: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/475386/apache-vs-nginx-vs-lighttpd-which-is-simpler-to-configure-and-administer

Popular services’ server choices

• Twitter uses Apache with Unicorn.
• GitHub uses nginx with Unicorn.

More Cool Stuff

JRuby vs Ruby

• 2011: http://torquebox.org/news/2011/02/23/benchmarking-torquebox/
• 2011: http://torquebox.org/news/2011/03/14/benchmarking-torquebox-round2/
• It’s worth pointing out that Unicorn comes out ahead of the other non-JRuby servers in all the benchmarks that are anywhere near a real-world situation.

Passenger in development

• 2010: http://blog.phusion.nl/2010/07/01/the-road-to-passenger-3-technology-preview-3-closing-the-gap-between-development-and-production-rethinking-the-word-easy/

Twitter uses MySQL for storing Tweets, and Cassandra for statistics and datamining

• 2010: http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/07/cassandra-at-twitter-today.html