Had a discussion with Alex Muse about various things and Ruby on Rails came up. They've successfully replaced PHP app that took months to develop with one that was created in about a week. I'm an avid fan of Rails and a rabid fan of the concept. But after hearing some performance woes I started running through some load tests. Surprisingly ROR is quite fast but probably not as fast as it could be. I'm reminded of coding Perl web-apps under FastCGI and converting them to run under mod_perl. (I've yet to explore SCGI)Its been a long time since I've integrated Tomcat with Apache as the standalone Tomcat server is more than fast enough especially when weighed against the overhead of managing the integration long term. The future of Rails is on WebBrick or something like it. There is no reason that a RUBY webserver cannot be as fast as Tomcat 5.5.

(Somebody needs to get Cameron Purdy slinging Ruby...)

I'll definitely post more information about this, including some raw numbers (specifically thread/process overhead of the initial request and then DB connection latencies) but I'll say this again. ROR is fast enough, this exploration is about understanding how ROR performs and how to tune it.

I've spent that last week tuning garbage collection with Bruce Snyder with some interesting positive results. You'll probably see a case studio about the work at some point. As well as a bit more about the work here...