Adam Byrtek

In the post on benchmarking HTTP performance I mentioned that according to my tests a cluster of Mongrels performs about 10-20% worse than the same number of FastCGI processes behind a reverse proxy. Recently I tried Thin, a new web server based on Mongrel libraries, and it turns out to be a solution that gets the best of both worlds. It is very easy to setup and manage (even easier than Mongrel), extremely flexible (mostly thanks to Rack) and really fast. It matches FastCGI in performance, without all the quirks, and can communicate through UNIX sockets too. I have to admit that I was impressed by the simple and clean design of Thin (which is based on existing quality modules). The only disadvantage is that it isn’t very mature yet — but in the near future Thin might become the best server for deploying Ruby web applications.