An Evaluation of Current Ruby on Rails Serving Approaches

1. An Evaluation of Current Ruby on Rails Serving Approaches Jeremy Witmer CS 526 Spring 2008

2. Overview • Purpose • Introduction • Application Servers • Reverse Proxies • Procedure • Benchmarking • Results • Conclusions • Future Research Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

3. Purpose The purpose of this project is to survey the current best application servers for Ruby on Rails, and best methods for reverse proxy to a cluster of application servers. Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

4. Introduction • What is Ruby? • Ruby is a dynamically typed object-oriented programming language with significant metaprogramming capabilities • What is JRuby? • JRuby is an implementation of Ruby that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) • What is Rails? • Rails is a web application development framework written Ruby, which uses the metaprogramming capabilities of Ruby to ease development effort. Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

5. Rails Application Serving Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

6. Application Servers • WEBrick • Mongrel • Thin Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

7. Reverse Proxies • Apache 2 • nginx • Pound • Swiftiply • Glassfish Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

8. Procedure 1. Set up a basic Rails application (used gullery) 2. Run a single instance of each application server and benchmark the throughput 3. For each of the reverse proxy options: 1. Set up the reverse proxy to dispatch to the cluster 2. Run a cluster of 3 Mongrels, first on Ruby, then on JRuby 3. Run the benchmarks to measure cluster throughput 4. Set up gullery application to run on Glassfish under JRuby and run the same benchmarks Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

9. Benchmarking • All benchmarks performed using RubyWebBench • RWB allows scripting requests and weighting among URLs in the application • Each cluster setup was tested 3 times with 1000 requests urls.add_url(20, "http://localhost:3500") urls.add_url(40, "http://localhost:3500/projects/show/1") urls.add_url(40, "http://localhost:3500/projects/show/1") Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

10. Benchmark Platform • 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo • 2 GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM • OSX 10.5 • For specific versions of the tested software, refer to the wiki Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

11. Results Application Servers, 1000 Request Benchmark Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

12. Results Reverse Proxies to Clusters, 1000 Request Benchmark Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

13. Conclusions • Use GlassFish – Combining the reverse proxy with the application server has significant benefit • Use Thin on native Ruby, with Apache2 if not JRuby • Ruby and JRuby similar overall in terms of performance • JRuby takes longer to start, but does better in terms of memory and processor usage • JRuby doesn’t have a user-space threading problem Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

14. Future Work • Benchmark modrails as an application server/proxy • Benchmark haProxy for reverse proxying • Compare results to hardware reverse proxy/load balancers Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

15. Wiki, Files, and Scripts • Wiki is at cs.uccs.edu/~jtwitmer/cs526/Project/ • Project report • Setup instructions for Rails application • Setup Instructions for all application servers and proxies • Wiki generated with Instiki: rubyforge.org/projects/instiki/ • Files at cs.uccs.edu/~jtwitmer/cs526/Project/FilesAndScripts.html Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526

16. References • Ruby: ruby-lang.org • JRuby: jruby.codehaus.org • RubyWebBench: http://rubyforge.org/projects/rwb/ • Ruby on Rails: rubyonrails.com • Mongrel: mongrel.rubyforge.org • Thin: code.macournoyer.com/thin/ • Apache2: apache.org • nginx: nginx.net • Pound: www.apsis.ch/pound/ • Swiftiply: swiftiply.swiftcore.org/ • GlassFish: wiki.jruby.org/wiki/JRuby_on_Rails_in_GlassFish Ruby on Rails Application Serving CS526