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Comment by sbraford | Hacker News Reader

I agree, being forced to know ahead of time how many mongrels you'll need is sub-optimal.

At the same time, it's trivial to switch this number if you've not hit your server resource limits yet. (i.e. when coming under a digg load)

Once server limits are reached (in Apache or nginx/mongrel/rails), the point is moot - you'll have to instantiate new servers at your co-lo / hosting company by hand anyway.

All that said, nginx is a fantastic web & proxy server. It blows Apache out of the water in terms of memory usage, etc.

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nginx - isn't it just another in a long line of select-based web servers that "blow Apache out of the water" when it comes to serving static resources? boa was what I set up to serve static files at Linuxcare back in ... 1999? Or is nginx different somehow? That's fine as far as it goes, but the tricky part lies in serving up the dynamic stuff.

Nginx is both incredibly fast at serving static files and pretty useful all around for reverse proxies and whatnot (not to mention being easier to configure/maintain than apache). I use it at work and it has been fantastic.

It's not select based, it is event based, utilizing the relatively new support for event-driven IO in the Linux and FreeBSD kernels (kqueue/epoll).

Ok, so it's a slightly different architecture, but it's still really an evolution of the single-process select-based server. To do anything "application like" - running code in ruby, php, python - you apparently (correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm just going from what I found after 5 minutes on the site) have to farm things out to FCGI, so you're back to the Apache model of separate processes - noting of course that unlike some people erroneously think, apache's processes each have a select loop, so it's not just forking processes for every connection!

My point is that the application processes are where things are tricky. Even 'big slow apache' can saturate fast connections with static content. The real trick is to get the most out of your dynamic code without under utilizing your resources (by launching only one mongrel instance, for example), or running things into the ground by letting your apps try and grab too much memory.

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