[ANN] Mongrel 0.1.1 -- A Fast Ruby Web Server (It Works Now, Maybe)

ruby-talk
1

Hi All,

I previously announce Mongrel 0.1.0, but since I released that late at night it of course had errors. This is just a small announcement for the fixed source:

http://www.zedshaw.com/downloads/mongrel-0.1.1.tar.bz2

Please grab this one and give it a try.

INSTALL

You can grab the above source and then do:

   rake
   ruby -Ilib examples/simpletest.rb &
   curl http://localhost:3000/test

It should print out "hello!". Check the source of examples/simpletest.rb to see how it's used.

*** It requires Ruby 1.8.4 to work and a C compiler to compile a small portable extension. ***

WHAT IT IS

Mongrel is a web server I wrote this week that performs *much* better than WEBrick (1350 vs 175 req/sec) and only has one small C extension. I'm looking to make Mongrel the answer to Java's Tomcat as a means of hosting Ruby web applications. Feel free to send me your dreams about a (sort of) Ruby hosting library.

Special thanks to Ezra and Sascha for testing and finding this.

Zed A. Shaw
http://www.zedshaw.com/

2

In future perf comparisons it would be great if you also compare it to
apache and/or lighttpd in a similar setup/situation just to factor out
the specifics of the machine you test it on.

Thanks,

Robert Feldt

3

Compiles and run without problems under fedora core4 (with an AMD 800
Mhz 500M Ram)

siege -u http://localhost:3000/test -d1 -r10 -c25

mongrel

···

_______

Elapsed time: 8.22 secs
Data transferred: 0.00 MB
Response time: 0.01 secs
Transaction rate: 30.41 trans/sec
Concurrency: 0.20
Longest transaction: 0.12
Shortest transaction: 0.00

webwrick
________

Elapsed time: 10.99 secs
Data transferred: 0.00 MB
Response time: 0.20 secs
Transaction rate: 22.75 trans/sec
Concurrency: 4.53
Longest transaction: 3.17
Shortest transaction: 0.01

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

4

this is my output under Cygwin now:

$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.3 (2005-09-21) [i386-cygwin]

$ rake
(in /cygdrive/h/Download/Browser/mongrel-0.1.1)
/usr/bin/ruby extconf.rb
checking for main() in -lc... yes
creating Makefile
make
gcc -g -O2 -I. -I/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/i386-cygwin -I/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/i386-cygwin -I. -c http11.c
gcc -g -O2 -I. -I/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/i386-cygwin -I/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/i386-cygwin -I. -c http11_parser.c
gcc -shared -s -Wl,--enable-auto-import,--export-all -L"/usr/lib" -o http11.so http11.o http11_parser.o -lruby -lc -lcrypt
cp ext/http11/http11.so lib
/usr/bin/ruby -Ilib:test "/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.6.2/lib/rake/rake_test_loader.rb" "test/test_http11.rb" "test/test_trie.rb" "te
st/test_ws.rb"
Loaded suite /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.6.2/lib/rake/rake_test_loader
Started
Error result after 6 bytes of 15
.Read 18 string was 18
...Hitting server
.
Finished in 2.048 seconds.

5 tests, 10 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors

$ ruby -Ilib examples/simpletest.rb &
[1] 4692

$ curl http://localhost:3000/test
hello!

$ ./ab.exe -S -n 3000 http://localhost:3000/test
Concurrency Level: 1
Time taken for tests: 5.656250 seconds
Complete requests: 3000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 156000 bytes
HTML transferred: 21000 bytes
Requests per second: 530.39 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 1.885 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 1.885 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 26.87 [Kbytes/sec] received

WOW, that is really something for Cygwin (Ruby/Cygwin is _really_ slow). It would be nice if there were at least a WEBrick benchmark included, so one could make a direct comparison. If you could get Mongrel to be at least half as fast as lighttpd that would be really something. Than it would be an alternative for production.

-Sascha

5

Zed Shaw wrote:

I previously announce Mongrel 0.1.0, but since I released that late at night it of course had errors. This is just a small announcement for the fixed source:

http://www.zedshaw.com/downloads/mongrel-0.1.1.tar.bz2

Please grab this one and give it a try.

This is a fantasy come true. Works nicely on Linux. Sensational! An era has opened.

I got Camping working with `register', but it needs both SCRIPT_NAME and PATH_INFO filled properly to work right. In the case of a script mounted at /blog, a /blog/view request should end up as (following the traditional CGI ways):

  SCRIPT_NAME = /blog
  PATH_INFO = /view

Anyway, here's a crappy postamble for any Camping scripts out there (none):

  if __FILE__ == $0
    Camping::Models::Base.establish_connection :adapter => 'sqlite3', :database => 'blog3.db'
    Camping::Models::Base.logger = Logger.new('camping.log')
    require 'mongrel'

    class CampingHandler < Mongrel::HttpHandler
        def process(request, response)
            Object.instance_eval do
                remove_const :ENV
                const_set :ENV, request
            end
            ENV['PATH_INFO'] = '/'
            s = response.socket
            def s.<<(str)
                write("HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\n#{str}")
            end
            Camping.run('', response.socket)
        end
    end

    h = Mongrel::HttpServer.new("0.0.0.0", "3000")
    h.register("/blog", CampingHandler.new)
    h.run.join
  end

_why

6

Zed,

Cool stuff. Is the intent that this enables an even more straightforward approach for running apps (such as a RoR app) than scgi under lighttpd? Ie., rather than scgi under lighttpd, just use mod_proxy?

Did you read this post, where Mark Mayo wonders why the newer frameworks haven't just been using an http interface (and instead have struggled with fcgi)?

http://www.vmunix.com/mark/blog/archives/2006/01/02/fastcgi-scgi-and-apache-background-and-future/

thanks,
Michael

7

Being a sucker for meaningless benchmarks I had to run this as well :))

[Mongrel]
% ruby -v
ruby 1.8.4 (2005-12-24) [powerpc-darwin7.9.0]
% ruby simpletest.rb
% ab -n 10000 http://localhost:3000/test
Requests per second: 660.20 [#/sec] (mean)

(I get a terse "ERROR: Object" from time to time)

[Webrick]
% ruby -v
ruby 1.8.4 (2005-12-24) [powerpc-darwin7.9.0]
% ruby webrick_compare.rb >& /dev/null
% ab -n 10000 http://localhost:4000/test
Requests per second: 37.90 [#/sec] (mean)

Here is something in python:

[Cherrypy][1]
% python -V
Python 2.4.2
% python tut01_helloworld.py
% ab -n 10000 http://localhost:8080/
Requests per second: 164.92 [#/sec] (mean)

And a bit of Lua [2] to round it up:

[LuaWeb][3]
% lua -v
Lua 5.1 Copyright (C) 1994-2006 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
% lua Test.lua
% ab -n 10000 http://localhost:1080/hello
Requests per second: 948.32 [#/sec] (mean)

Cheers

···

On Jan 20, 2006, at 13:31, Zed Shaw wrote:

Mongrel is a web server I wrote this week that performs *much* better than WEBrick (1350 vs 175 req/sec) and only has one small C extension.

--
PA, Onnay Equitursay
http://alt.textdrive.com/

[1] http://www.cherrypy.org/
[2] Lua: about
[3] http://dev.alt.textdrive.com/browser/LW/

8

When running IOWA apps under webrick, one can do exactly this. I don't do
that for production apps, however, because the performance penalty. Even
with the socket overhead, Apache or lighttpd with fcgi, or Apache with
mod_ruby are both substantially faster.

If mongrel proves fast enough, though, using a proxy approach would become a
very viable alternative for production apps.

Kirk Haines

···

On Friday 20 January 2006 12:33 pm, Michael Schoen wrote:

Cool stuff. Is the intent that this enables an even more straightforward
approach for running apps (such as a RoR app) than scgi under lighttpd?
Ie., rather than scgi under lighttpd, just use mod_proxy?

Did you read this post, where Mark Mayo wonders why the newer frameworks
haven't just been using an http interface (and instead have struggled
with fcgi)?

9

I'm planning a better performance comparison in the future, those metrics were just quick dirty ones to proof the concept.

Zed A. Shaw

···

On Jan 20, 2006, at 8:04 AM, Robert Feldt wrote:

In future perf comparisons it would be great if you also compare it to
apache and/or lighttpd in a similar setup/situation just to factor out
the specifics of the machine you test it on.

Thanks,

Robert Feldt

10

Thanks Alciato, it seems to be pretty portable so far, so the inclusion of the small C extension isn't such a bad idea.

One thing though--and I'm just picking nits though--Siege is a really bad tool for performance testing. Try out httperf or even apachebench since they give much more accurate statistics. Also, you'll want to run many more requests. It takes 10000 on my machine to get a stable performance characteristics.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback and watch for more.

Zed A. Shaw

···

On Jan 20, 2006, at 8:43 AM, Alciato wrote:

Compiles and run without problems under fedora core4 (with an AMD 800
Mhz 500M Ram)

siege -u http://localhost:3000/test -d1 -r10 -c25

mongrel
_______

Elapsed time: 8.22 secs
Data transferred: 0.00 MB
Response time: 0.01 secs
Transaction rate: 30.41 trans/sec
Concurrency: 0.20
Longest transaction: 0.12
Shortest transaction: 0.00

webwrick
________

Elapsed time: 10.99 secs
Data transferred: 0.00 MB
Response time: 0.20 secs
Transaction rate: 22.75 trans/sec
Concurrency: 4.53
Longest transaction: 3.17
Shortest transaction: 0.01

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/\.

11

That's sweet. Didn't even think it would go that fast on Cygwin. Great news as this means there's an exit strategy for IIS and Win32 people other than SCGI. Now if I can just the win32 version of fork working I'd be gold.

One thing, could you do the same test against WEBrick using the examples/webrick_compare.rb script? Just for my info. You'll need to > /dev/null the output to make the test more fair.

Zed A. Shaw

···

On Jan 20, 2006, at 12:14 PM, Sascha Ebach wrote:

$ ./ab.exe -S -n 3000 http://localhost:3000/test
Concurrency Level: 1
Time taken for tests: 5.656250 seconds
Complete requests: 3000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 156000 bytes
HTML transferred: 21000 bytes
Requests per second: 530.39 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 1.885 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 1.885 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 26.87 [Kbytes/sec] received

WOW, that is really something for Cygwin (Ruby/Cygwin is _really_ slow). It would be nice if there were at least a WEBrick benchmark included, so one could make a direct comparison. If you could get Mongrel to be at least half as fast as lighttpd that would be really something. Than it would be an alternative for production.

-Sascha

12

This is a fantasy come true. Works nicely on Linux. Sensational! An era has opened.

Thanks! Yeah, I'm totally excited about it. I may finally be able to shut those "performance" whiners up. :slight_smile:

I got Camping working with `register', but it needs both SCRIPT_NAME and PATH_INFO filled properly to work right. In the case of a script mounted at /blog, a /blog/view request should end up as (following the traditional CGI ways):

Right, I have to work out the interplay of the register function and how script/path info would work. Also have to CGI convert the request parameters and a few other niceties. I'm contemplating where you would register handlers, and you'd be able to say whether it has to be an exact match, or a partial match. If it's partial then the matched part would be the SCRIPT_NAME, the rest PATH_INFO. If it's exact then I'm not sure what.

Any suggestions on this would be great. Basically, what would be your dream URI response scheme?

Zed A. Shaw

···

On Jan 20, 2006, at 2:32 PM, why the lucky stiff wrote:

13

Zed,

Cool stuff. Is the intent that this enables an even more straightforward approach for running apps (such as a RoR app) than scgi under lighttpd? Ie., rather than scgi under lighttpd, just use mod_proxy?

Yes, the intention is to produce the optimal deployment scenario for Ruby web applications. A secondary purpose is to prove my unofficial "Zed's STFU Performance Razor":

"All languages are as fast as the fastest language they can access so STFU."

:slight_smile:

I'm imagining that if I can get the various web frameworks to run well and fast under Mongrel, and sprinkle in a few sexy features, then it'd be the best way to deploy the applications. I'm thinking a primary concern is performance, followed by ease of deployment, then management, and finally API simplicity. What's nice with just plain HTTP is that there's already a mountain of support for production HTTP hosting and deployment technology.

Did you read this post, where Mark Mayo wonders why the newer frameworks haven't just been using an http interface (and instead have struggled with fcgi)?

http://www.vmunix.com/mark/blog/archives/2006/01/02/fastcgi-scgi-and-apache-background-and-future/

Yeah, I read that post literally as I was building the precursor to SCGI, and then decided to take the plunge and just do it. The story goes like this:

1) Win32 IIS dudes beg me to get SCGI working under IIS.
2) I like Win32 dudes, hell I love everybody the same (which is very little, but it's equal at least).
3) I start working on an HTTP->SCGI proxy. I use Ragel to make a clean, fast, and correct parser.
4) madrobby schools me on my parser with his mountain of browsers until I get it working better.
5) I keep asking myself, "Why don't I just take the parser and make a Ruby web server?"
6) I keep asking this but it doesn't sink in. I decide to toy with the idea. Someone shows me the articl Then I read the above article and just do it.
7) What you have is about 3-4 days later.

So, that's the semi-official story. What I also have though is a HTTP parser that I can break out and make into a library. This means that other languages could possibly pick it up and write their own similarly fast web servers with minimal effort. Keep your fingers crossed.

Zed A. Shaw

···

On Jan 20, 2006, at 2:33 PM, Michael Schoen wrote:

14

This is great.
Can you add Apache to your list of benchmarks?

Jim Freeze

···

On Jan 21, 2006, at 3:07 PM, PA wrote:

Being a sucker for meaningless benchmarks I had to run this as well :))

[Mongrel]
Requests per second: 660.20 [#/sec] (mean)

[Webrick]
Requests per second: 37.90 [#/sec] (mean)

[Cherrypy][1]
Requests per second: 164.92 [#/sec] (mean)

[LuaWeb][3]
Requests per second: 948.32 [#/sec] (mean)

15

PA ha scritto:

Mongrel is a web server I wrote this week that performs *much* better than WEBrick (1350 vs 175 req/sec) and only has one small C extension.

Being a sucker for meaningless benchmarks I had to run this as well :))

<snip>
Hey, that was cool. Any chance yo see how would they run with -c 10?
(and I wonder how fast twisted.web would be :slight_smile:

···

On Jan 20, 2006, at 13:31, Zed Shaw wrote:

16

I'd love to make it flexible enough to work with any framework, but I'm starting with ruby on rails. If you've got some sample code of how IOWA maybe runs in WEBrick, or suggestions on what you'd need to get IOWA running, I'd love it.

Zed A. Shaw

···

On Jan 20, 2006, at 4:21 PM, Kirk Haines wrote:

On Friday 20 January 2006 12:33 pm, Michael Schoen wrote:

Cool stuff. Is the intent that this enables an even more straightforward
approach for running apps (such as a RoR app) than scgi under lighttpd?
Ie., rather than scgi under lighttpd, just use mod_proxy?

Did you read this post, where Mark Mayo wonders why the newer frameworks
haven't just been using an http interface (and instead have struggled
with fcgi)?

When running IOWA apps under webrick, one can do exactly this. I don't do
that for production apps, however, because the performance penalty. Even
with the socket overhead, Apache or lighttpd with fcgi, or Apache with
mod_ruby are both substantially faster.

If mongrel proves fast enough, though, using a proxy approach would become a
very viable alternative for production apps.

17

One thing, could you do the same test against WEBrick using the examples/webrick_compare.rb script? Just for my info. You'll need to > /dev/null the output to make the test more fair.

Alright, here you go.

first Mongrel:

ab.exe -S -n 10000 http://localhost:3000/test
Concurrency Level: 1
Time taken for tests: 19.437500 seconds
Complete requests: 10000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 520000 bytes
HTML transferred: 70000 bytes
Requests per second: 514.47 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 1.944 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 1.944 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 26.08 [Kbytes/sec] received

and WEBrick started with

$ ruby -Ilib examples/webrick_compare.rb 2&>1 /dev/null &

ab.exe -S -n 10000 http://localhost:4000/test
Concurrency Level: 1
Time taken for tests: 118.62500 seconds
Complete requests: 10000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 1730000 bytes
HTML transferred: 60000 bytes
Requests per second: 84.70 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 11.806 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 11.806 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 14.31 [Kbytes/sec] received

These results are very promising. I bet if you can manage to make a native win32 version the results will double or triple. A 5 times boost will even make Cygwin a viable development environment. I suspect that the win32 version will even be fast enough for production.

-Sascha

PS: With output on the Cygwin/WEBrick combo will drop below 10 req/s on my box.

18

Noob question here.

No intent to impugn Zed's mad skilz or the need for something like
Mongrel. I'm just confused by why it would be common to develop or
deploy a ruby on rails app with something other than production servers
like Apache.

So far, all of the rails demos I have seen are using webrick. This has
been true even for setups like macosx that come with apache already set
up and running.

Does apache not come standard with everything needed to serve a rails
app? If not, is there an add-on module for apache that makes it
rails-savvy?

Or is it the case that all rails apps have to be served by a special
rails server like mongrel or webrick?

thanks,
jp

···

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

19

[httpd]
% httpd -v
Server version: Apache/1.3.33 (Darwin)
% ab -n 10000 http://localhost/test.txt
Requests per second: 1218.47 [#/sec] (mean)

[lighttpd]
% lighttpd -v
lighttpd-1.4.9 - a light and fast webserver
% ab -n 10000 http://localhost:8888/test.txt
Requests per second: 3652.30 [#/sec] (mean)

Cheers

···

On Jan 22, 2006, at 16:28, Jim Freeze wrote:

Can you add Apache to your list of benchmarks?

--
PA, Onnay Equitursay
http://alt.textdrive.com/

20

[Mongrel]
% ruby -v
ruby 1.8.4 (2005-12-24) [powerpc-darwin7.9.0]
% ruby simpletest.rb
% ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost:3000/test
Requests per second: 386.31 [#/sec] (mean)

[Webrick]
% ruby -v
ruby 1.8.4 (2005-12-24) [powerpc-darwin7.9.0]
% ruby webrick_compare.rb >& /dev/null
% ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost:3000/test
Requests per second: 27.58 [#/sec] (mean)

[Cherrypy]
% python -V
Python 2.4.2
% python tut01_helloworld.py
% ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost:8080/
Requests per second: 164.77 [#/sec] (mean)

[LuaWeb]
% lua -v
Lua 5.1 Copyright (C) 1994-2006 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
% lua Test.lua
% ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost:1080/hello
Requests per second: 927.04 [#/sec] (mean)

[httpd]
% httpd -v
Server version: Apache/1.3.33 (Darwin)
% ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost/test.txt
Requests per second: 1186.10 [#/sec] (mean)

[lighttpd]
% lighttpd -v
lighttpd-1.4.9 - a light and fast webserver
% ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost:8888/test.txt
Called sick today (fdevent.c.170: aborted)

Cheers

···

On Jan 24, 2006, at 16:43, gabriele renzi wrote:

Hey, that was cool. Any chance yo see how would they run with -c 10?

--
PA, Onnay Equitursay
http://alt.textdrive.com/