Mod Rails hosting two months on…
It’s been a little over two months since we switched our Ruby on Rails hosting packages from FastCGI to mod rails (Phusion Passenger), what better time then for a debrief on how the switch went and what we have discovered two months on. I’m sure no one will be surprised to hear mod rails is far superior to FastCGI in pretty much every way.
Firstly the initial switch, for the most part it went very well, nearly all rails applications worked exactly the same under mod rails as they did FastCGI. A very small number of applications had issues, all of which were easy to fix within a few minutes. Overall the switch went very smoothly only requiring an apache rebuild and the mod rails installation.
Initially we started using the 1.x branch of mod rails, with a large number of rails applications running we noticed Apache would locking up periodically and require a manual restart. This issue only occurred on production servers running many rails applications and was not apparent on our test servers. The problem turned out to be fairly wide spread on servers with a lot of traffic. The Phusion Passenger guys were quick to respond to feedback and remedied the problem with a 2.x beta release. Since upgrading to the 2.x branch of mod rails it’s been rock solid!
What benefits have we seen since switching to mod rails hosting?
Firstly, startup time has been greatly reduced. Where as FastCGI needs to load the rails core code as well as the applications code into memory each time it’s started, mod rails keeps the rails core code in memory so only the applications code needs to be loaded. This has reduced rails application start up time from around 5-25 seconds to about 2-10 seconds depending on the size of the application. A huge difference I’m sure you will agree.
Another benefit of mod rails is the reduced memory usage and better process management. When running FastCGI we needed to keep watch for runaway processes using too much memory, spawning too many children or processes that had simple become stuck. Mod rails has none of these issues, in our experience processes are stopped correctly when not in use and memory usage is always within acceptable limits. Mod rails keeps rails applications in check meaning there is little external process management needed.
Our customers are much happier using our mod rails offerings. Deployment is easier, applications are more stable, faster and more responsive, and don’t suffer form any of the FastGCI setup peculiarities. In a nutshell customers can do more themselves without needing to contact us for help or guidance. Customers are also loving the faster application startup time, when running FastCGI we would often get emails from customers asking why their application took so long to load the first time it was requested, since switching we have not had a single email regarding application startup time, it’s simple not an issue any more.
To find out more about our range of mod rails hosting accounts in the UK take a look at our rails package page. Why not take one for a spin? With free setup and our 30 day full refund money back guarantee can you think of a reason not to give us try?
