Example: Maximizing Rails on Minimal Hardware

damao.net

12 points·bfioca··5 comments

I have been hacking away on a Rails app for the past while, and in about a months time it will be ready for public beta - I have no idea how much server power I am going to need.

Any YC'ers got any advice here - I cannot see it being overly popular, but I want it to be able to withstand a bit of a load spike.

I was thinking getting a VPS from Slicehost and see where it gets me. I was also going to start with Mysql, Apache and Rails all on the same VPS. On my box at home, I get 50 requests per second on most actions (I am the only user - no load simulation) - there is no way I will be serving that many requests from day one, or quite possible ever!

I know its very much an 'it depends' answer, but how far do you reckon a gig of RAM and a single CPU will get you in Rails terms (with zero page caching as all pages are logged in pages)?

That should get you pretty far, depending on how big your database gets. Not knowing much about your application, I can't really say much else, though. We started out with a server much like that and were able to deal with a good techcrunching on it. The first thing you'll want to do when you get more users, though, is get a separate database server so you can have more available ram for things like query caches, buffer pools, and etc.

Thanks for that - I figured something like that would get me far enough - I guess if you need to scale beyond a single server it is a sign of at least some success!

totally - they keep telling me "that's a good problem to have."

The real take-away from this article is the default rails configurations and many of the recommended capistrano recipes just won't cut it in heavy load situations with complex apps.

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