mongrel vs fastCGI+lighty

[dc]

hiya -

we are building a pure ruby app (not rails) and wondered what people's
comments are on different ways to deploy this.

I've heard mongrel categorized as a kind of better webbrick, ie just a
nicer dev time quick'n'dirty webserver. is it usable for a
high-performance production environment?

in terms of lighty/fastCGI, this seems to be working well for us; at
least a lot better than apache w/ fcgi. it also gives us a basic
webserver for files etc. we did have to spend some time getting a
framework running for this tho.

so i was wondering if there is any advantage to using mongrel for
non-Rails apps?
esp if we dont really care about running on windows.

any insight appreciate to compare apples with oranges.

tx,

/dc

 

[khaines]

I've heard mongrel categorized as a kind of better webbrick, ie just a
nicer dev time quick'n'dirty webserver. is it usable for a
high-performance production environment?

in terms of lighty/fastCGI, this seems to be working well for us; at
least a lot better than apache w/ fcgi. it also gives us a basic
webserver for files etc. we did have to spend some time getting a
framework running for this tho.

so i was wondering if there is any advantage to using mongrel for
non-Rails apps?
esp if we dont really care about running on windows.

Mongrel is nice. It is easy to use, and quite fast.

All of my web site and apps are non-rails apps (IOWA framework), and my
preferred deployment solution right now for most of them is to either use
Mongrel, or to use a hybrid solution that employs the Mongrel http parser
on top of EventMachine.

Where individual requests are reliably handled quickly, the hybrid
approach is the fastest, especially on a heavily loaded site/app where
there may be moderate to high numbers of concurrent requests, they hybrid
approach that I use has worked very well, and this is, most often, the
mode I choose to run sites and apps in.

Where there may be some requests which are slow to handle, it's sometimes
better for me to run the site using Mongrel.

In general, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Mongrel as a base http
handling platform for a Ruby web app.


Kirk Haines