Brainspl.at

Building Custom Mongrel Handlers for Speed and Concurrency

Posted by ezmobius Thu, 05 Apr 2007 18:59:00 GMT

I will be giving a talk at the SDForum Ruby Conference April 21&22. I speak sometime on Sunday. Here is my talk’s abstract. I will post slides and hopefully audio after my talk.

All the cool kids are using Mongrel to run their Rails applications these days. And sometimes Mongrel itself gets so tightly coupled with Rails in peoples thoughts that they don’t realize that Mongrel is something they can use outside of Rails to build their own fast, custom HTTP servlets.

Zed Shaw has built an awesome HTTP server library that is easily extensible and very high performance. In this talk we will explore how to make your own hybrid Application Server with a custom Mongrel handler and some Ruby code.

The web is moving towards a world of resources and services. Rails is the tool of choice for building these web2.0 applications. But sometimes you have a critical section of your application that Rails is just too slow at serving, or you need to be able to support many concurrent users in portions of your site. Learning how to build custom Mongrel handlers will help you scale these performance critical areas of your application.

We will build a simple dynamic javascript server from scratch. This type of app can be used for web stat tracking or javascript widget serving. We will end with some benchmarks showing off how fast a Ruby web service can be when you get closer to the metal.