1. An Evaluation of Current Ruby on Rails Serving Approaches
Jeremy Witmer
CS 526
Spring 2008

2. Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526
Overview
Purpose
Introduction
Application Servers
Reverse Proxies
Procedure
Benchmarking
Results
Conclusions
Future Research
Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

3. Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526
Purpose
The purpose of this project is to survey the current best application servers for Ruby on Rails, and best methods for reverse proxy to a cluster of application servers.
Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

4. Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526
Introduction
What is Ruby?
Ruby is a dynamically typed object-oriented programming language with significant metaprogramming capabilities
What is JRuby?
JRuby is an implementation of Ruby that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM)
What is Rails?
Rails is a web application development framework written Ruby, which uses the metaprogramming capabilities of Ruby to ease development effort.
Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

5. Rails Application Serving
Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

6. Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526
Application Servers
WEBrick
Mongrel
Thin
Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

7. Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526
Reverse Proxies
Apache 2
nginx
Pound
Swiftiply
Glassfish
Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

8. Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526
Procedure
1. Set up a basic Rails application (used gullery) 2. Run a single instance of each application server and benchmark the throughput 3. For each of the reverse proxy options: 1. Set up the reverse proxy to dispatch to the cluster 2. Run a cluster of 3 Mongrels, first on Ruby, then on JRuby 3. Run the benchmarks to measure cluster throughput 4. Set up gullery application to run on Glassfish under JRuby and run the same benchmarks
Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

9. Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526
Benchmarking
All benchmarks performed using RubyWebBench
RWB allows scripting requests and weighting among URLs in the application
Each cluster setup was tested 3 times with 1000 requests
urls.add_url(20, "
urls.add_url(40, "
Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

10. Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526
Benchmark Platform
2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2 GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM
OSX 10.5
For specific versions of the tested software, refer to the wiki
Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

11. Results Application Servers, 1000 Request Benchmark Software Platform
Total Time
Requests/Second
Mean Time/
Request (ms)
WEBrick
Ruby
159
JRuby
272
Thin
142
Mongrel
154
233
Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

12. Results Reverse Proxies to Clusters, 1000 Request Benchmark Software
Platform
Total Time
Requests/Second
Mean Time/
Request (ms)
Apache2
Ruby 82
JRuby 78
nginx 97
Pound 83 85
Swiftiply
Ruby only 90
GlassFish
JRuby only
1.1563 5
100,000 Req. 10
Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

13. Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526
Conclusions
Use GlassFish – Combining the reverse proxy with the application server has significant benefit
Use Thin on native Ruby, with Apache2 if not JRuby
Ruby and JRuby similar overall in terms of performance
JRuby takes longer to start, but does better in terms of memory and processor usage
JRuby doesn’t have a user-space threading problem
Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

14. Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526
Future Work
Benchmark modrails as an application server/proxy
Benchmark haProxy for reverse proxying
Compare results to hardware reverse proxy/load balancers
Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

15. Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526
Wiki, Files, and Scripts
Wiki is at cs.uccs.edu/~jtwitmer/cs526/Project/
Project report
Setup instructions for Rails application
Setup Instructions for all application servers and proxies
Wiki generated with Instiki: rubyforge.org/projects/instiki/
Files at cs.uccs.edu/~jtwitmer/cs526/Project/FilesAndScripts.html
Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

16. Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526
References
Ruby: ruby-lang.org
JRuby: jruby.codehaus.org
RubyWebBench:
Ruby on Rails: rubyonrails.com
Mongrel: mongrel.rubyforge.org
Thin: code.macournoyer.com/thin/
Apache2: apache.org
nginx: nginx.net
Pound:
Swiftiply: swiftiply.swiftcore.org/
GlassFish: wiki.jruby.org/wiki/JRuby_on_Rails_in_GlassFish
Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526