Mongrel is a popular web server that works with Ruby. Mongrel is typically used to
serve Rails applications, but it can also be used to host small web servers directly. You
can find more information about Mongrel at http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/rdoc/files/
README.html. You??™ll use Mongrel as a simple XML server in this chapter??™s example.
Of course, you could write a Rails application to serve XML data. But for a simple
server, such as one that has only a single URL, that might be overkill. Consider that an
empty Rails application on my FreeBSD machine uses 3MB of memory, and, in my experience,
Rails applications of any complexity rarely use less than 10MB of memory per
process (and often more).
For example, if you need a chat server with one connection per user, and you??™re using
a Rails application consuming 10MB or more of memory per user, that memory consumption
can add up very quickly. If you have hundreds of users, that becomes a very
serious problem. Alternatively, you can often handle your chat connection with a simple
server.
Pages:
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249