Brainspl.at: Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy

"Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy" by Saimon Moore

Wed, 30 May 2007 05:41:00 +0000

"swifiplied_mongrel does everything evented_mongrel does, plus a little bit." So when using with nginx is there any reason to uses evented mongrel? In order to migrate my current nginx > mongrel setup should I get nginx to proxy to swiftiply (on a custom port) and then startup either evented or swiftiplied mongrels?

"Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy" by Kirk Haines

Thu, 24 May 2007 03:03:00 +0000

Argh! That was a brain burp when I wrote the docs. It's always been EVENT and SWIFT. Fixing that right now.

"Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy" by Jim Kane

Wed, 23 May 2007 19:34:22 +0000

For those of you who choose to step onto the bleeding edge, note that the docs are slightly out of date for 0.5.1. The env var for turning on swiftiplied mode is now SWIFT instead of SWIFTIPLY.

"Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy" by Kirk Haines

Wed, 23 May 2007 15:01:16 +0000

Agres,

Good question. I'll write up more information on this whole topic for the website. But, in short:

If you are running nginx right now, the simplest thing is to just use evented_mongrel.

swiftiplied_mongrel is event based, as well. The reason evented_mongrel exists is mostly because I got it for free while creating swiftiplied_mongrel -- swifiplied_mongrel does everything evented_mongrel does, plus a little bit.

If you use Swiftiply with Mongrel, you would do it with swiftiplied_mongrel.

If you used it behind nginx, you would have nginx proxy to Swiftiply in the same way you would if you were using haproxy, pen, or something else in that spot.

"Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy" by Agres

Wed, 23 May 2007 08:41:41 +0000

So, how to make all of this play nice with nginx? :) Switching from Nginx->Mongrel to Nginx->Swiftiply->Evented Mongrel? Or its better to go just Swiftiply->Evented Mongrel?

"Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy" by W. Andrew Loe III

Tue, 22 May 2007 05:46:12 +0000

For those curious about Mongrel vs Evented Mongrel on some generic hardware (Celeron 2.4, 512MB RAM running Debian). http://journal.andrewloe.com/2007/5/22/mongrel-vs-evented-mongrel

I did 3 tests of 5000 requests with a concurrency of 1, both Mongrel and Evented Mongrel achieved about 270 req/sec. When the concurrency was bumped to 10, Mongrel fell to 120 req/sec whereas Evented Mongrel was able to maintain pace at 270 req/sec.

"Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy" by Kirk Haines

Mon, 21 May 2007 23:04:29 +0000

EventMachine is currently released under the GPL. If it makes sense to turn evented_mongrel/swiftiplied_mongrel into a full fledged fork, then so be it. I'll get a mailing list started up for swiftiply discussions. This is something that can be explored better in that medium, I think.

"Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy" by Jeremy

Mon, 21 May 2007 16:21:38 +0000

I asked Zed this at Railsconf. From what I gathered, there's no interest in pulling this into Mongrel directly, because of some licensing issues with EventMachine. He expressed that if the evented_mongrel worked well for you and you trusted the code, more power to you. Zed also previously wrote an Ruby/Event when he was working on SCGI (pre-mongrel), so there's a possibility he might pick that back up in the future.

"Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy" by Nick (nickjost@yahoo.com)

Mon, 21 May 2007 15:49:50 +0000

Actually I have the same question and it becomes a concern, not right now, but in the future. Are there talks going on? If its a patch its a fork. If talks are going on then a future patch of Mongrel becomes much safer to me/

"Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy" by Kirk Haines

Mon, 21 May 2007 01:08:19 +0000

Eliot, I don't think either evented_mongrel or swiftiplied_mongrel is a fork of Mongrel, right now. I intentionally did not package up a complete mongrel source with my patches applied. Instead, right now, it is more of an extension on Mongrel that is intended to be transparent to whatever Mongrel handlers are being used; they shouldn't know that they are not running on the standard Mongrel. Kirk Haines

"Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy" by Eliot

Fri, 18 May 2007 23:41:00 +0000

Does Zed seem interested in integrating the EventMachine stuff or does this amount to a fork of Mongrel?

"Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy" by Nick

Fri, 18 May 2007 16:18:31 +0000

Wonderful change. I'm not a fan of the lighthttpd/fastcgi set up and this let's me use mongrel with the possibility of one day doing swiftiply/mongrel.

"Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy" by Kirk Haines

Tue, 15 May 2007 04:40:21 +0000

Just FYI, but a 0.5.1 has been released that fixes several reported bugs.

"Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy" by Paul

Mon, 14 May 2007 18:52:48 +0000

What about a comparison to Apache/mod_proxy_balance?

"Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy" by Kirk Haines

Mon, 14 May 2007 05:28:57 +0000

Just FYI. I'll be releasing a 0.5.1 that fixes a few bugs, tomorrow.

"Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy" by Kirk Haines

Mon, 14 May 2007 00:57:22 +0000

Ah! An updated EM gem was going to be uploaded, but Francis C. was travelling all week, so that may not be done yet. I bet that is where the trouble lies.

"Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy" by Luis Lavena

Sun, 13 May 2007 22:42:10 +0000

Kirk, no, I'm on Windows, but event-machine tests failed on me, they are broken or Windows it is ;-) Didn't jump to swiftiply yet, will do this week and check stability of a few applications. Anyway, mail you later about Win32 issues (if they show up).

"Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy" by Kirk Haines

Sun, 13 May 2007 18:26:19 +0000

Luis, are you on OSX, too?
Scott sent me his little test script, and on my systems I can't get a single failure.
I tested it with up to 100k requests at concurrencies from 1 to 100. No failures at all. They all look pretty much like this:


Concurrency Level:      100

Time taken for tests:   19.542144 seconds

Complete requests:      100000

Failed requests:        0

Write errors:           0

Total transferred:      252200000 bytes

HTML transferred:       240000000 bytes

Requests per second:    5117.15 [#/sec] (mean)

Time per request:       19.542 [ms] (mean)< br />
Time per request:       0.195 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

Transfer rate:          12602.97 [Kbytes/sec] received

I do not have an OSX machine to test with, though, so that might be the common thread in these failure reports.

"Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy" by Luis Lavena

Sun, 13 May 2007 15:06:52 +0000

Thanks Kirk, doing some testing on event-machine alone, but tests fails (and segmentation fault), will investigate further later.

"Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy" by Kirk Haines

Sun, 13 May 2007 14:41:55 +0000

Jeremy, thanks. I will address that ASAP.

"Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy" by Jeremy

Sun, 13 May 2007 13:50:11 +0000

It seems as though the evented_mongrel does not handle invalid http format gracefully, at last for me: /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/swiftiply-0.5.0/src/swiftcore/evented_mongrel.rb:33:in `execute': Invalid HTTP format, parsing fails. (Mongrel::HttpParserError) from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.0.1/lib/mongrel/configurator.rb:293:in `join' from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.0.1/lib/mongrel/configurator.rb:293:in `join' from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.0.1/lib/mongrel/configurator.rb:293:in `each' from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.0.1/lib/mongrel/configurator.rb:293:in `join' from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/swiftiply-0.5.0/bin/mongrel_rails:145:in `run' from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.0.1/lib/mongrel/command.rb:211:in `run' from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/swiftiply-0.5.0/bin/mongrel_rails:252 from /usr/bin/mongrel_rails:18:in `load' from /usr/bin/mongrel_rails:18

"Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy" by Kirk Haines

Sun, 13 May 2007 13:26:06 +0000

Scott, would you email me details about what you are doing so that I can try to reproduce it. I've not seen anything like that in my hammering and abusing of this code. Same with you, Lourens. Could you email me the details of what you are doing? Thanks, Kirk Haines

"Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy" by Lourens Naude

Sun, 13 May 2007 12:50:22 +0000

Excellent find. However, on startup it doesn't seem to queue requests the way stock Mongrel does and have to do a 2 or 3 second 'sleep' in my Capistrano restart task to avoid 500's being raised. Anyone else experience the same?

"Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy" by Scott Fleckenstein

Sun, 13 May 2007 07:11:54 +0000

Exciting Stuff! Free speed boosts for all! Using the simplest of hello world mongrel handlers, I was getting 3000+ requests per second, nearly 3x what I get for mongrel alone. Granted, that is imaginary world... Weird issue i'm getting though, the server seems to fail when load is sustained: ab -v -c 1 -n 55000 http://localhost:9998/ nets about 30000 failed requests whereas pure mongrel just chugs along. This is really exciting though, i'm looking forward to your next post on swiftiply.

"Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy" by Kirk Haines

Sun, 13 May 2007 04:13:49 +0000

Luis, it should work on Windows, but I admit that I haven't tested it on Windows, yet. If I am not to busy with family stuff tomorrow, I'll check it and see if I run into any issues.

Event Driven Mongrel and Swiftiply Proxy

ezmobius — Sat, 12 May 2007 08:49:00 +0000

Kirk Haines of the IOWA project has finally released his swiftiply package. I’m really excited about this project. The project has a few parts. There is a monkey patch to Mongrel that rips out ruby’s threading and Socket classes and replaces them with an eventmachine event loop. I have been testing this evented mongrel extensively for the past few weeks and it is notably faster and higher throughput then normal multi threaded mongrel.

It’s a drop in compatible with rails and merb and should work with any custom mongrel handlers you have. Once you install the swiftiply package you can start mongrel_rails with the new evented mongrel like this:

$ EVENT=1 mongrel_rails start

I am getting a huge speedup in merb from evented mongrel. And rails apps run very stable and do not start to slow down and bloat under high concurrent load like threaded mongrel does.

This is big news people. This thing makes shit faster and more stable under load

Now that it the easy way to get started with evented mongrel and buy yourself some performance. But the swiftiply proxy is also very very cool.

Swiftiply works differently from a traditional proxy. In Swiftiply, the backend processes are clients of the Swiftiply server—they make persistent socket connections to Swiftiply. One of the major advantages to this architecture is that it allows one to start or stop backend processes at will, with no configuration of the proxy. The obvious disadvantage is that this is not behavior that backends typically expect.

Luckily there is a swiftiplied version of mongrel in this package as well. I’ll make another post about how to use swiftiply later.

A week or so ago I was able to speed merb up from 299req/sec fro hello world to 620req/sec. Well dropping in evented mongrel gets merb’s hello world to a blazing 987req/sec!! no bull, see this pastie:

http://pastie.caboo.se/57881

So go grab swiftiply and play around a bit. I am using this in production for more then a week now with no adverse affects and the app that runs it has much better response times and memory usage then it did before.

http://swiftiply.swiftcore.org/index.html