Question

I am currently running a simple rails app on heroku. However, it seems to be really slow. Could it be because my rails app is configured to run on Webbrick?

I was looking around, and heard about “thin” and “lighttpd”.

What are the difference between these web servers? Is lighttpd an option when it comes to rails? – Would it be better to run my rails app on thin since its ruby based? Sorry about the number of questions, not very technical with web servers.

Answer 1

Your questions are a bit all over the place, so I’ll answer the theme, but won’t be able to provide technical assistance at this point.

lighttpd is an HTTP server. It does really nothing else. Other programming frameworks expose themselves using FastCGI to handle requests. LighttpdOnRails is a great walkthrough on setting up Rails to run on lighttpd. If you are only doing Rails, you probably want one of the alternatives, but lighttpd provides a tremendous amount of flexibility the others don’t. (Self-plug: I maintain crosslight, a tool making lighttpd installs and configurations easy).

Webbrick is a dedicated server component for your rails apps. Your app includes it as a library, and starts itself. This is a good solution for apps that are standalone.

Thin is a dedicated servlet container. It is a piece of standalone software that runs your code as a library. It allows your code to be more modular, since it takes care of configuring everything.

If you seriously think Webbrick is your performance bottleneck, you’ll probably want to try out Thin next. If it still runs slow, and you want to give ligghtpd a shot, go for it, but it’s probably your application at that point.

I apologize for not having a more specific answer to the performance issue, but hopefully this addresses the larger question of getting a handle on these tools.