The presentation I gave at Fosdem 2009 on sunday Feb 8 in the Ruby/Rails Devroom.

1. Rails Hosting
Openminds BVBA - Gent
www.openminds.be

2. Shared Rails Hosting
Openminds::Hosting::Pro.clone

3. Architecture
• Controlable medium-sized
• Virtualized (Xen 3.x.y)
• Debian Etch
• Nginx ( proxy’s)
• Webservers
• MySQL 5/5.1 - PostgreSQL on DB

4. Architectuur
• Intel Dual Quad Core systemen / 16GB
• Centrale storage through iSCSI
• Tuning helps a lot

5. Shared - version 1
lighttpd & FastCGI (dispatch.fcgi)

6. Version 1: pro’s
• fast
• lighttpd easily scriptable (lighty)
• lighttpd managed/monitors ruby processes
• mixing rails and php is possible

7. V1: Mephisto search

8. V1: Radiant page

9. Version 1: lighty
• Perl-wrapper around lighttpd
• port locking
• force the production-env
• easy, short configuration files for clients

10. Version 1: lighty
$HTTP[quot;hostquot;] =~ quot;^(www.)?example.openminds.bequot; {
var.app = quot;examplequot;
accesslog.filename = base + quot;/logs/quot; + app + quot;.access.logquot;
server.errorlog = base + quot;/logs/quot; + app + quot;.error.logquot;
load Rails with capistrano app
}

11. Version 1: con’s
• restart everything on change
• deploy => restart needed
• heavy sites => connection drops
• errors in logfiles
• errors in config files (new users)

12. Version 1: con’s
• port hijacking
• reboot: server dies
• process management is hard

14. Shared - Version 2
Passenger (mod_rails)

15. Passenger
• Convinced
• Central daemon - Central config
• Process-heaven
• acts_like :php_hosting

17. Passenger: con’s
• No client-config files (sock)
• Maximum amount of processes limiting, not
for minimum amount (startup delay)
• Apache 2: love & hate - small setup might
give memory problems

18. General problems
• Gems
• Deployment
• No TESTING!

19. Non-shared
Openminds::Hosting::Dedicated.clone

20. Dedicated
application & helper applications
client decides

21. Small Dedicated
Nginx + fair queueing + Mongrel cluster
Monit (m/monit)

22. Medium Dedicated
Passenger (?)

23. Large Dedicated
A la tête du client

24. Dedicated
sudo

25. Technology
Mongrel / Evented Mongrel / Ebb / Thin / Nginx /
Apache / Passenger / Merb / Enterprise Ruby / JRuby /
Glassfish / ...

26. Common

27. Rails version
1 ) install new rails gem
2 ) Open support system

28. Gem-versions
Sync
rake gems:freeze

29. Deployment
Capistrano
Provide recipy

30. Pound
No-worry-ssl

31. Rails is slow
Developer
Hosting

32. Rails hosting
Inhouse Rails knowledge is needed

33. Warning
• database.yml
• restart application
• read your logs

34. Q&A

35. Who
Bernard Grymonpon / wonko([_.]be)?
Openminds BVBA - www.openminds.be