Sivarg

This morning I have discovered Jiwa :

"Jiwa.fm is an online music social network offering free unlimited and high quality music streaming. Users can listen to the music they like, create and share playlists, make recommendations and discuss between them." (Jiwa website)

They propose a very large range of bands and artists (from Mika to Bob Marley, and from Crystal Method to Rage Against the Machine). The sound is very clear and all songs are encoded in high quality (since songs are NOT provided by users). Especially, I appreciate the Jazz "Radio".

What a good competitor to Deezer !

I was thinking of this post since a few days, and I discover something today I'd like to share.

I've started to use Ruby on Rails since a few months, and really love the language / framework. I can set up a working website a very few lines, without spending my time configuring and mapping . Nevertheless, when it comes to production websites, rails is very deceptive. Let me explain a standard installation (there are a lot of ways to do that) :

1. you put your files on the server, and Capistrano is wonderful for that, and not only.
2. Install and configure some mongrel_cluster instances (yes, for good performances, you'll have to do that)
3. Install and configure a webserver such as nginx or apache2
4. Proxify all your mongrel instances using your webserver.

Sounds pretty simple ! It is, actually, once you already have done that before.

My problem is more for hosting several sites on one server. Mongrel is eating a lot of memory, and you'll need to create at least as many instances as the number of sites. That means, if you have a single page site, just for info, you'll need to setup mongrel, and have an instance running and eating your memory. This is mainly because ruby / rails is not thread safe, and one Mongrel instance will handle one request at a time. What a shame.
That also means you need to reserve memory for your site, even if you don't have visitor !

Today I have discovered a new hope in my rails quest : http://modrails.com

Modrails is a new module for apache2, acting like mod_php or mod_perl. That means => EXIT MONGREL ! Now you can host a lot a mini rails websites, just by running a single apache2.
If this module goes out in stable version soon, this will allow (at last !) hosters to provide some performant and scalable mutualized environments for customers.

As far as I know, the module is slightly more performant than mongrel, but I more care about memory usage. I'll try to post a performance comparison post soon.