Hi,
Today only I came to know about 'thin' web server. I have installed the gem and used it. But I don't know whether 'thin' web server is better than webrick or mongrel. If so, can you please compare these web servers?
Thanks in advance...
Webrick is the webserver bundled with rails and is makes u ready to start development instantly… it is not suitable for production environments as stated in the rails wiki. so get it out of the comparisons.
There are several resources out there which made comparison between thin and mongrel. thin is known to be faster than mongrel and has less memory consumption. check this out: http://fukamachi.org/wp/2008/02/28/mongrel-vs-thin/
http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/Mongrel_vs_Thin
It also has the advantage of using sockets to communicate with the load balancer which can be a great plus
It is recommended that u get to know Thin more.
Thanks a lot Mahmoud. The links you gave were very useful.
You are welcome, Actually I tried benchmarking them last night… with 10000 requests and concurrency level 400… requesting a static resource of size 1.5KB thin was quite faster… Mongrel: Concurrency Level: 400 Time taken for tests: 37.370 seconds Complete requests: 10000 Failed requests: 0 Write errors: 0 Total transferred: 17470000 bytes HTML transferred: 15510000 bytes Requests per second: 267.59 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 1494.800 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 3.737 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Thin: Concurrency Level: 400 Time taken for tests: 16.051 seconds Complete requests: 10000 Failed requests: 0 Write errors: 0 Total transferred: 17328660 bytes HTML transferred: 15517755 bytes Requests per second: 623.02 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 642.037 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 1.605 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) the gap was reduced though when i dropped the concurrency level to 1 Mongrel Concurrency Level: 1 Time taken for tests: 20.795 seconds Complete requests: 10000 Failed requests: 0 Write errors: 0 Total transferred: 17470000 bytes HTML transferred: 15510000 bytes Requests per second: 480.87 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 2.080 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 2.080 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Thin Concurrency Level: 1
Time taken for tests: 14.597 seconds Complete requests: 10000 Failed requests: 0 Write errors: 0 Total transferred: 17320000 bytes HTML transferred: 15510000 bytes Requests per second: 685.06 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 1.460 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 1.460 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
that’s was a bit expected due to the fact that thin uses EventMachine instead of spawning threads for handling requests like mongrel… the more concurrency level u have… the more context switching between threads… so if you are deploying a website that expects high traffic… that’s a very important point to consider.
On 4 Dec 2008, at 09:44, Mahmoud Said wrote:
that's was a bit expected due to the fact that thin uses
EventMachine instead of spawning threads for handling requests like
mongrel... the more concurrency level u have.. the more context
switching between threads... so if you are deploying a website that
expects high traffic.. that's a very important point to consider.
Although anyone sane is using nginx/apache for static content, and for
dynamic stuff the time spent in rails will almost always dominate the
overhead from mongrel/thin (and of course pre 2.2 only one of those
requests is handled per instance at any one time)
Fred
On 4 Dec 2008, at 09:44, Mahmoud Said wrote:
that’s was a bit expected due to the fact that thin uses
EventMachine instead of spawning threads for handling requests like
mongrel… the more concurrency level u have… the more context
switching between threads… so if you are deploying a website that
expects high traffic… that’s a very important point to consider.
Although anyone sane is using nginx/apache for static content, and for
dynamic stuff the time spent in rails will almost always dominate the
overhead from mongrel/thin (and of course pre 2.2 only one of those
requests is handled per instance at any one time)
Fred
I totally agree Fred, i was just testing them directly on my local machine. so i used a static resource instead of a very small rails action. Most of the time will be wasted in the ruby code executing the action itself. I just wanted to focus on the rest of the time (that application independent part)
My thought is that, both Mongrel/Thin will spend same time in rails. Or will there be any difference?
Mahmoud Said a écrit, le 12/04/2008 10:44 AM :
[...] that's was a bit expected due to the fact that thin uses EventMachine instead of spawning threads for handling requests like mongrel... the more concurrency level u have.. the more context switching between threads...
Ruby threads are green threads : there's no context switching. And IIRC they are built around select internally so they basically use the same underlying system code EventMachine uses.
Lionel
My thought is that, both Mongrel/Thin will spend same time in rails. Or
will there be any difference?
– i guess both should spend nearly the same time in rails code… you’ll notice the difference if you have small request (requests that required not much processing)
Mahmoud Said a écrit, le 12/04/2008 10:44 AM :
[…] that’s was a bit expected due to the fact that thin uses EventMachine
instead of spawning threads for handling requests like mongrel… the
more concurrency level u have… the more context switching between
threads…
Ruby threads are green threads : there’s no context switching. And IIRC
they are built around select internally so they basically use the same
underlying system code EventMachine uses.
I’m not sure about how ruby green threads or implemented. but I guessed they have some scheduling mechanism (within the user space) that is different from the EventMachine approach. Thus scheduling and switching overhead. Maybe I’m wrong… and there is some other reason that makes thins quite faster for small requests. I tried comparing them again for a very small request that does nothing but render :text=>‘1234567890’ thin is 79% faster than mongrel Mongrel
Server Software: Mongrel
Server Hostname: localhost Server Port: 3001
Document Path: / Document Length: 10 bytes
Concurrency Level: 500 Time taken for tests: 60.121 seconds Complete requests: 1000
Failed requests: 0 Write errors: 0 Total transferred: 468000 bytes HTML transferred: 10000 bytes Requests per second: 16.63 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 30060.399 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 60.121 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Transfer rate: 7.60 [Kbytes/sec] received
Thin
Server Software: thin Server Hostname: localhost
Server Port: 3000
Document Path: / Document Length: 10 bytes
Concurrency Level: 500 Time taken for tests: 33.922 seconds Complete requests: 1000 Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0 Total transferred: 444652 bytes HTML transferred: 10060 bytes Requests per second: 29.48 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 16961.071 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 33.922 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 12.80 [Kbytes/sec] received
For larger requests (requests that needs db queries and a lot of processing) they’re nearly the same
Karthi kn wrote:
Hi,
Today only I came to know about 'thin' web server. I have installed the gem and used it. But I don't know whether 'thin' web server is better than webrick or mongrel. If so, can you please compare these web servers?
Thanks in advance...
The main advantage of Thin over Mongrel, is not only increased throughput, you also get: - easy clustering - smaller memory footprint
Thin has been running for over 8 months now at www.digiprof.fr, and we only experienced a crash once, certainly due to a memory leak somewhere in our application code.
