(from American Scientist magazine, Mar-Apr 2008)
Thin vs. Mongrel: A Ruby on Rails performance shootout 7
Posted by science
on April 07, 2008
Previously Science and wayneseguin published a study looking at the performance of nginx fair proxy. To take that a little further, Science conducted an examination of how Thin and Mongrel compare head-to-head on performance. For kicks we took a look at Rails page template caching facility to see if that significantly impacts performance (it does). Full details follow..
Thin, Ruby on Rails & Nginx fair proxy: Performance testing 3
Posted by science
on April 07, 2008
By science & wayneeseguin
Thin a new-ish application server, primarily designed for serving the same community as Zed Shaw’s (and now community managed) masterwork Mongrel. Its job is to dispatch web requests, primarily Rails and other Ruby frameworks. There’s plenty already written about Thin, to get you up and running.
I’ve been eying Thin and thanks to Wayne, I got motivated to test it out. He and I spent the better part of a day doing configuration analysis and performance testing on Thin in the context of EngineYard’s hosting environment. We had access to a brand new, unloaded “slice” (aka web server) on their server farm. The stack we used looks like:
Load balancers => Nginx => unix sockets => Thin => Rails
We ran a quite a few performance tests against Thin using the above setup and overall liked what we saw.