

Ask YC: What's your Rails setup? - lyime

I am in the midst of development of the startup I am working on. I am also wearing the sys admin shoes. Its actually loads of fun. Anyways.. I was curious on what type of environment, server setup you guys are using for your live sets/dev sites. What combination of technologies etc.
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petercooper
I have an "old" server running Rails 1.x apps on Apache 1.3 using FastCGI.
It's been surprisingly reliable, and has hosted apps without significant
issues for over three years now (my first Rails deployment was December 2004).
All of these apps use MySQL.

My "new" server is, again, Apache 1.3 but using SwitchPipe (
<http://switchpipe.org/> ) which is a lot more reliable as it manages the
mongrel and thin processes I am using. However, in the future I anticipate I
will move to Phusion Passenger ( <http://modrails.com/> ). I am starting to
use SQLite3 more in apps. It's "fast enough" for small sites.

I used EV1Servers (now The Planet) for quite some time, but now am a SoftLayer
man!

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rcoder
We're running a pretty "old fashioned" deployment: Apache 2.2 on a dedicated
load balancer and SSL terminator, proxying (using mod_proxy_balancer) to a
handful of servers running about four Mongrel instances per core. It's all
backed by replicated PostgreSQL and Oracle instances for persistence.

We do service monitoring and control via monit, deploy via Capistrano, and run
a custom source-built Ruby distribution from a network share mounted on each
of the app server boxes.

I'm watching mod_rails/Passenger with interest, and once it seems to have
stabilized a bit, will probably try it out for at least some of our apps.

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rantfoil
For posterous.com, we use slicehost VPS, ruby on rails and mysql. Pretty
standard setup overall. Separate DB, App and Web server slices, and a separate
job server for longer-running postprocesses. S3 for storage and backup.

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listic
Why did you choose SliceHost and not i.e. Linode? The latter seems to offer
more for the price, and boasts some nice VDS manager and API.

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mdasen
Linode offers slightly more in terms of specs, but they only recently switched
to Xen virtualization (from User Mode Linux which is much slower). Their
service is less mature.

Slicehost is really popular and with good reason. Linode might turn out to be
just as good, but I know the wonderful service I have gotten at Slicehost and
how many other sites in the web 2.0 community are there - heck, the Xen blog
itself is on Slicehost and not any other Xen provider.

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holdenk
So I might be a bit odd but for the rails site which I did run for awhile the
db layer was sqlite replicated on each machine. Since it only did reads this
turned out to work better than MySQL. Everything was on EC2 instances (except
for the dev instance on my laptop). The correct combination of technologies
depend largely on your application, what are you building?

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lyime
Thats a good question. Its an online service/applicaiton that will stream DJ
sets (1-2hours longs) in an interactive way. There are going to be hundreds of
sets. Just image the usability like youtube, where each set is presented like
a youtube video and is going to have a track-list and discussion. The
streaming is going to be done using lighttpd Mod_streaming (pseudo http
streaming) played via a flash player. Thats the gist of it.

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CompanyGardener
Joyent Accelerator (Solaris) -> nginx (w/ fair proxy module) -> thin -> rails

mysql for data

memcached for caching

sphinx for search (ThinkingSphinx plugin)

