

Example: Maximizing Rails on Minimal Hardware  - bfioca
http://damao.net/vhosts/node.to/wordpress/?p=29

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fendale
I have been hacking away on a Rails app for the past while, and in about a
months time it will be ready for public beta - I have no idea how much server
power I am going to need.

Any YC'ers got any advice here - I cannot see it being overly popular, but I
want it to be able to withstand a bit of a load spike.

I was thinking getting a VPS from Slicehost and see where it gets me. I was
also going to start with Mysql, Apache and Rails all on the same VPS. On my
box at home, I get 50 requests per second on most actions (I am the only user
- no load simulation) - there is no way I will be serving that many requests
from day one, or quite possible ever!

I know its very much an 'it depends' answer, but how far do you reckon a gig
of RAM and a single CPU will get you in Rails terms (with zero page caching as
all pages are logged in pages)?

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bfioca
That should get you pretty far, depending on how big your database gets. Not
knowing much about your application, I can't really say much else, though. We
started out with a server much like that and were able to deal with a good
techcrunching on it. The first thing you'll want to do when you get more
users, though, is get a separate database server so you can have more
available ram for things like query caches, buffer pools, and etc.

~~~
fendale
Thanks for that - I figured something like that would get me far enough - I
guess if you need to scale beyond a single server it is a sign of at least
some success!

~~~
bfioca
totally - they keep telling me "that's a good problem to have."

------
bfioca
The real take-away from this article is the default rails configurations and
many of the recommended capistrano recipes just won't cut it in heavy load
situations with complex apps.

