Rails Hosting
Openminds BVBA - Gent
www.openminds.be

Shared Rails Hosting
Openminds::Hosting::Pro.clone

Architecture
• Controlable medium-sized
• Virtualized (Xen 3.x.y)
• Debian Etch
• Nginx ( proxy’s)
• Webservers
• MySQL 5/5.1 - PostgreSQL on DB

Architectuur
• Intel Dual Quad Core systemen / 16GB
• Centrale storage through iSCSI
• Tuning helps a lot

Shared - version 1
lighttpd & FastCGI (dispatch.fcgi)

Version 1: pro’s
• fast
• lighttpd easily scriptable (lighty)
• lighttpd managed/monitors ruby processes
• mixing rails and php is possible

V1: Mephisto search

V1: Radiant page

Version 1: lighty
• Perl-wrapper around lighttpd
• port locking
• force the production-env
• easy, short configuration files for clients

Version 1: lighty
$HTTP[\"host\"] =~ \"^(www.)?example.openminds.be\" {
var.app = \"example\"
accesslog.filename = base + \"/logs/\" + app + \".access.log\"
server.errorlog = base + \"/logs/\" + app + \".error.log\"
load Rails with capistrano app
}

Version 1: con’s
• restart everything on change
• deploy => restart needed
• heavy sites => connection drops
• errors in logfiles
• errors in config files (new users)

Version 1: con’s
• port hijacking
• reboot: server dies
• process management is hard

Shared - Version 2
Passenger (mod_rails)

Passenger
• Convinced
• Central daemon - Central config
• Process-heaven
• acts_like :php_hosting

Passenger: con’s
• No client-config files (sock)
• Maximum amount of processes limiting, not
for minimum amount (startup delay)
• Apache 2: love & hate - small setup might
give memory problems

General problems
• Gems
• Deployment
• No TESTING!

Non-shared
Openminds::Hosting::Dedicated.clone

Dedicated
application & helper applications
client decides

Small Dedicated
Nginx + fair queueing + Mongrel cluster
Monit (m/monit)

Medium Dedicated
Passenger (?)

Large Dedicated
A la tête du client

Dedicated
sudo

Technology
Mongrel / Evented Mongrel / Ebb / Thin / Nginx /
Apache / Passenger / Merb / Enterprise Ruby / JRuby /
Glassfish / ...

Common

Rails version
1 ) install new rails gem
2 ) Open support system

Gem-versions
Sync
rake gems:freeze

Deployment
Capistrano
Provide recipy

Pound
No-worry-ssl

Rails is slow
Developer
Hosting

Rails hosting
Inhouse Rails knowledge is needed

Warning
• database.yml
• restart application
• read your logs

Q&A

Who
Bernard Grymonpon / wonko([_\\.]be)?
Openminds BVBA - www.openminds.be