Since purchasing a slice of heaven a few days ago, I’ve setup a very lightweight Rails stack consisting of Thin & nginx for my Rails needs. Since I went for a slice with just 256MB of RAM, memory consumption becomes a pretty serious issue. nginx has been around for quite a while now, and has recently started to become more and more popular in Rails deployments due to the fact that’s incredibly lightweight, very fast and stable – perfect not only for VPS jerks like me, but for anyone who really doesn’t feel it’s necessary to run Apache for static content/cluster proxying/load balancing. Thin is something I came across very recently and I decided to try is as a replacement for mongrel since I’d heard some great things about it, even if it is still alpha. It’s performance in comparison to mongrel (even with a tacked on event machine) looks very impressive on paper.

Setting up clustering with it is a snap, just spawn the processes and pipe them into nginx. Here’s a startup script borrowed from Stephen Celis:

namespace :thin do

  namespace :cluster do    desc ‘Start thin cluster’

    task :start => :environment do

      `cd #{RAILS_ROOT}`

      port_range = RAILS_ENV == ‘development’ ? 3 : 8

      (ENV[‘SIZE’] ? ENV[‘SIZE’].to_i : 4).times do |i|

        Thread.new do

          port = ENV[‘PORT’] ? ENV[‘PORT’].to_i + i : (“#{port_range}%03d” % i)

          str  = “thin start d -p#{port} -Ptmp/pids/thin#{port}.pid”

          str = " e#{RAILS_ENV}"

          puts str

          puts “Starting server on port #{port}…”

          `#{str}`

        end

      end

    end

desc ‘Stop all thin clusters’

    task :stop => :environment do

      `cd #{RAILS_ROOT}`

      Dir.new(“#{RAILS_ROOT}/tmp/pids”).each do |file|

        Thread.new do

          if file.starts_with?("thin")

            str  = “thin stop -Ptmp/pids/#{file}”

            puts "Stopping server on port #{file[/\d/]}…"

            `#{str}`

          end

        end

      end

    end

  end

end

Then spawn however many processes you want using something like:

rake thin:cluster:start RAILS_ENV=production SIZE=2 PORT=3000

To stop them, use:

rake thin:cluster:stop

With that all nicely setup, you can use an nginx config similar to mine to get things in order:

upstream dapperjerk {

        server 127.0.0.1:3000;

        server 127.0.0.1:3001;

    }

server {

            listen   80;

            server_name  www.dapperjerk.com;

            rewrite ^/(.*) http://dapperjerk.com permanent;

           }
server {

            listen   80;

            server_name dapperjerk.com;
access_log /home/jason/public_html/blog/log/access.log;
error_log /home/jason/public_html/blog/log/error.log;
root   /home/jason/public_html/blog/public/;
index  index.html;
location / {
proxy_set_header  X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header  X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
proxy_redirect false;
if (-f $request_filename/index.html) {
rewrite (.*) $1/index.html break;
}
if (-f $request_filename.html) {
rewrite (.*) $1.html break;
}
if (!-f $request_filename) {
proxy_pass http://dapperjerk;
break;
}
}
}

And that’s really all there is too it. I’m not a masochist so I’ve never bothered to fully read Apache’s documentation, but I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here by saying that it seems to be a lot easier to manage nginx. I haven’t really put thin through its paces yet, but we’ll see in the coming weeks as I cobble together a custom blog app to run this place.