JulianGruber.com

Phusion, the company behind Phusion Passenger aka Mod_rails is going to release the Ruby Enterprise Edition (sometime), promissing about 33% less memory usage than with current ruby sollutions.

Since you guys must probably be bored out of your !@/o%\$ waiting for Ruby Enterprise Edition to be released, let’s play a little play to let the time pass by quicker mmm’kay? ;)

So they started a quizz at http://www.rubyenterpriseedition.com/ showing two graphs with the results of speed- and memory-consumption-tests of the following webservers/deployment concepts:

• Apache (prefork MPM) + Passenger
• Apache (worker MPM) + Passenger
• Apache (worker MPM) + Ruby Enterprise Edition + Passenger
• LiteSpeed
• Nginx + Mongrel
• Nginx + Thin

As both the speed- und the memory-usage-graph have no legend, it is our task to find out what colour depicts what server. As you can see, on both graphs the purple webserver is the fastest and takes the less memory, so purple equals Apache (worker MPM) + Ruby Enterprise Edition + Passenger (if not the Phusion people would make fun of themselves^^).

The yellow server uses a bit more memory than the others and also is slower than them, so I think yellow equals Apache (prefork MPM) + Passenger, because the prefork MPM employs single-threaded processes and is known for less speed and more memory usage than the worker MPM for example. Though, it exists for compatibility reasons.

I think, Litespeed is represented by the green bar, because it is quite fast and uses not much memory. I benchmarked it using ab (apache benchmarking tool) and it used exactly 200mb of ram, just as in the diagram.

Left are

• Light blue (a bit slow, higher memory usage)
• Red (belongs to the slower ones, memory usage is a bit higher than average)
• Gray (fast, by far most memory usage)

and

• Apache (worker MPM) + Passenger
• Nginx + Mongrel (slower and more memory usage than thin)
• Nginx + Thin (faster and less memory usage than mongrel)

Next I pick the gray bar, as it imidiatelly jumps to the eye with it’s incredible memory usage; and the only webserver left, which can possible differ that much from the other ones, is Apache with the worker MPM (Thin is based on Mongrel, so there can’t be that big difference between the two). Apache (worker MPM) equals gray.

The rest is easy: because red is better in speed and memory consumption than light blue, red must be the combination Nginx + Thin, Nginx + Mongrel beeing light blue.

I hope, my answers are right :-) and I’m already looking forward to the release of Ruby Enterprise Edition.

PS.: I have enabled Passenger on my account on Dreamhost and it runs really fast and stable. You can see it in action on this blog.

Here are some covers I created for the upcoming first Taste Of Disolation album:

A stunning discovery: Micky Mouse hides in the gardens of Versailles! This must be part of an old plot!

Those are some sketches inspired by aboriginal art for our current art project in school. Sorry for the bad quality, I’ll make a real scan soon.