
Making Rails 12X Faster - sant0sk1
http://oldmoe.blogspot.com/2008/09/building-never-blocking-rails-making.html
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irrelative
This is certainly good news for beginners, but for serious scaling, rails
itself is almost never the problem.

The way this test was done was by making postgres sleep between requests -- in
reality, postgres would become the bottleneck fairly quickly.

Not trying to rain on anyone's parade though -- it's great news for the small
to medium sized rails-powered site.

~~~
anotherjesse
Even for large sites this (combined with other rails/ruby improvements) is a
huge gain.

Because each rails app server can only handle a single request at a time, you
have to spawn more and more instances of rails. Each of these instances
consume 50-200MB of ram. Being able to have a single app server per server
means I can stop spending so much on ram (or use it for other purposes).

So at a large scale, this will be a large impact because it will reduce the
number of mongrels/thins/... you have to run.

~~~
irrelative
That's correct. My understanding is (having never been there myself) that if
you're running a large site, you're going to have to throw hardware at a
scaling problem -- that said, if just hardware solves your problem, you're in
great shape.

------
sfamiliar
railsenvy podcast mentioned this, and that mysql support would be coming
'soon', but since this is ruby 1.9 only, it's not a terribly useful thing
until there exists a rails version that fully supports 1.9.

~~~
bfioca
Actually there's already mysql support in the mysqlplus driver.
[http://www.espace.com.eg/neverblock/blog/2008/08/28/neverblo...](http://www.espace.com.eg/neverblock/blog/2008/08/28/neverblock-
mysql-support/)

It's supposed to be 1.8.6 compatible but neverblock isn't, I don't think - so
I'm not sure what the advantage of this alone would be. I'd like to know,
though.

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tdavis
Not to produce sour grapes here, but the Twisted framework has had async db
adapters for quite a while now.

Still, good for Rails. I will be much less annoyed by Ruby/Rails adoption when
(1) Rails performs better and (2) the Ruby interpreter doesn't suck.

~~~
jon_dahl
You find it annoying that other people prefer a certain technology?

