

Mongrel2 1.0beta4 Out, 1.0 Is Nigh - megaman821
http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1282985871.html

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momoro
Web scale dev/null is going to revolutionize sharding.

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steve19
Can you explain what web scale /dev/null means?

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alexgartrell
Zed cites the rationale for web scale /dev/null
(<http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/6995033/>).

To thoroughly kill the joke, the idea is that you can write really fast
software by writing your output to /dev/null (vs. disk) which basically makes
write a NOP. Of course, it's completely useless in practice :)

web scale and sharding are just two other overused terms from the cited video
(making fun of NoSQL fanboys).

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prodigal_erik
I've seen this come up a few times, and benerved myself to ask the really
stupid question: what is this for? Why am I supposed to want a process
boundary between my HTTP stack and my applications, instead of running them
inproc with mod_whatever? If it's a load balancer, how is it better than using
a NAT to forward TCP streams and letting the app servers handle HTTP?

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pjscott
For one thing, mod_whatever may not exist for whatever hot new language you
want to use. ZeroMQ already has bindings for most languages people might want
to use (including weird ones) and there are only like 16 C functions plus some
constant declarations, so bindings are easy to make. And once you have ZeroMQ
support, Mongrel2 can talk to you. That may not be a killer feature for you,
but it's really nice.

Plus, everything in the design of Mongrel2 just seems to make sense. I'm not
sure how to describe it; Mongrel2 smells good.

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megaman821
This is looking pretty good so far. Anyone know if you can do a weight round-
robin scheme with this? If I treat every server the same the smaller ones
would get flooded in no time.

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zedshaw
If you mean for the proxying, not yet. For the 0MQ handlers it definitely
does, but some folks also want to do blocking before sending to the backends.

We've basically laid down the core features and then we'll start planning
things like this. Page caching, different proxy backend schemes, filters,
handlers, etc.

