Now on to Performance

Saturday, February 18, 2006, at 07:22AM

By Eric Richardson

For work I have a Rails app that we're going to be taking into production on Wednesday. As such, I figure I should probably start taking more than a passing interest in things like performance.

During development I've just been using WEBBrick, which has been great since I just use svn to update the server and boom there are my changes. Unfortunately, though, it's not all too quick. And even more importantly, it can't scale past one CPU. Seeing as the server has two, and with hyperthreading it thinks it has four, I figure that's an issue. But at least WEBBrick gives me a baseline performance number of 7.2 requests per second (for an arbitrary but fairly intense operation) that I can build off of.

I installed lighttpd yesterday (which I keep trying to misspell as libghttpd), but all I've managed to get Rails to do in FastCGI mode is segfault.