Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.7-2011.01 released | Hacker News Reader

Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.7-2011.01 released

blog.phusion.nl

38 pointsxal8 comments

I'm really hoping that we'll see some REE love for 1.9, but right now they're focused on other things (rightly so). Forking unicorn workers is so expensive without a COW-friendly GC that I've reverted back to thin.

Very happy to see development continuing, and I'll be upgrading all my 1.8.7 apps to run on this later today.

So, thanks phusion team!

Can you elaborate on unicorn being expensive with 1.9.2 in comparison to thin?

IIRC they're both using the prefork model, so shouldn't they have roughly the same COW/GC issues?

I don't believe thin uses a pre-fork model, though I could be wrong on that account. I went through some pretty intense memory comparisons between the two over the past month, I'll have to write it up tomorrow.

I looked at the Thin code again and it uses Open3 to spawn multiple instances of itself as subprocesses.

Intuitively I'd expect that method to consume more Ram than forking because there's no opportunity for COW at all. However it'd be interesting to see what you measured, looking forward to your write-up if you get around to it.

I just forked Moonshine and added a patch for this: https://github.com/jarinudom/moonshine

If you're already running ree187 with Moonshine, just install that fork and run 'cap ruby:upgrade' to update to the latest version (or wait until it gets merged into https://github.com/railsmachine/moonshine).

Edit: Oops, I forgot it's in a branch on my fork, so you'll have to do something like

  $ rails plugin install git@github.com:jarinudom/moonshine.git -r ree187-2011.01

That article and corresponding REE marketing pages do a great job of telling me why I should use REE.

Can anyone tell me why I shouldn't use REE? (Currently using MRI 1.8.7)

If you don't need the memory savings, you probably want to start migrating to ruby 1.9 for the speed improvements. JRuby is also a good alternative. (faster than 1.8, OS-level threads)

So no reason to not use REE, but there are other alternatives that have their own strengths.

When you want to use 1.9. You should really only be using the 1.8 branch if time or money prevent you from doing the upgrade.

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