Tuesday, May 31, 2011
On 30 May 2011, at 20:12, Yiannis wrote:
I bought a new server and I was wondering what application server is
the best choice for a typical web application with rails.
I've thought for a long time that the best choice was apache/nginx and
phusion passenger but nowadays I am hearing a lot about thin and
unicorn. I have used passenger a lot and to be honest, even though
passenger is very easy to setup, wasn't so great. What is your
suggestions?
What was "not so great" about Passenger? For us it's serving high volumes with great ease and performance.
For your typical Rails application, Passenger will be the best choice (with ruby enterprise edition). It's easy to setup, it spawns new instances when it needs to, kills them when they have been idle for a while.
Both Thin and Unicorn work behind a load balancer (whether that's Apache's or HAProxy or … doesn't really matter all too much). It's up to you to decide beforehand how many instances you expect to be needed to run and they will all be running all the time.
Now, there are valid scenarios where you could consider using Thin or Unicorn over Passenger.
Thin, being an evented server, is simply so much better than Passenger when you're using gems like EventMachine. Not that it can't be done with Passenger, but you'll need to be very careful with spinning down the reactor on despawn, firing it back up again on every new instance spawn and spawning a new instance usually takes a bit longer too.
Unicorn is great for fast clients, but falls dead in the water with slow clients (Rainbow claims to solve this more or less). So when using Unicorn, you need to be 100% sure you will be dealing with low latency clients (i.e. no mobile, no keepalive sockets etc). It really should be: request, response, spit it out.
The gist of this whole reply is that you should determine for your application which application will suit it best and what your personal preference is (yeah, that also comes into play quite often :-)). We use Passenger for just about everything, but also have one or two Thin servers running for legacy apps that run under a different Ruby version.
Best regards
Peter De Berdt
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