Ask YC: What's your Rails setup? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: What's your Rails setup?

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I am in the midst of development of the startup I am working on. I am also wearing the sys admin shoes. Its actually loads of fun. Anyways.. I was curious on what type of environment, server setup you guys are using for your live sets/dev sites. What combination of technologies etc.

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I have an "old" server running Rails 1.x apps on Apache 1.3 using FastCGI. It's been surprisingly reliable, and has hosted apps without significant issues for over three years now (my first Rails deployment was December 2004). All of these apps use MySQL.

My "new" server is, again, Apache 1.3 but using SwitchPipe ( http://switchpipe.org/ ) which is a lot more reliable as it manages the mongrel and thin processes I am using. However, in the future I anticipate I will move to Phusion Passenger ( http://modrails.com/ ). I am starting to use SQLite3 more in apps. It's "fast enough" for small sites.

I used EV1Servers (now The Planet) for quite some time, but now am a SoftLayer man!

We're running a pretty "old fashioned" deployment: Apache 2.2 on a dedicated load balancer and SSL terminator, proxying (using mod_proxy_balancer) to a handful of servers running about four Mongrel instances per core. It's all backed by replicated PostgreSQL and Oracle instances for persistence.

We do service monitoring and control via monit, deploy via Capistrano, and run a custom source-built Ruby distribution from a network share mounted on each of the app server boxes.

I'm watching mod_rails/Passenger with interest, and once it seems to have stabilized a bit, will probably try it out for at least some of our apps.

For posterous.com, we use slicehost VPS, ruby on rails and mysql. Pretty standard setup overall. Separate DB, App and Web server slices, and a separate job server for longer-running postprocesses. S3 for storage and backup.

Why did you choose SliceHost and not i.e. Linode? The latter seems to offer more for the price, and boasts some nice VDS manager and API.

Linode offers slightly more in terms of specs, but they only recently switched to Xen virtualization (from User Mode Linux which is much slower). Their service is less mature.

Slicehost is really popular and with good reason. Linode might turn out to be just as good, but I know the wonderful service I have gotten at Slicehost and how many other sites in the web 2.0 community are there - heck, the Xen blog itself is on Slicehost and not any other Xen provider.

So I might be a bit odd but for the rails site which I did run for awhile the db layer was sqlite replicated on each machine. Since it only did reads this turned out to work better than MySQL. Everything was on EC2 instances (except for the dev instance on my laptop). The correct combination of technologies depend largely on your application, what are you building?

Thats a good question. Its an online service/applicaiton that will stream DJ sets (1-2hours longs) in an interactive way. There are going to be hundreds of sets. Just image the usability like youtube, where each set is presented like a youtube video and is going to have a track-list and discussion. The streaming is going to be done using lighttpd Mod_streaming (pseudo http streaming) played via a flash player. Thats the gist of it.

Joyent Accelerator (Solaris) -> nginx (w/ fair proxy module) -> thin -> rails

mysql for data

memcached for caching

sphinx for search (ThinkingSphinx plugin)

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