Jason Madigan

1.1.3 - IPSF Keep’s On Truckin’

Like I thought, IphoneSimFree’s unlock continues to work with recent iPhone updates. Taking the baseband out of lockdown requires a little minicom pockery until we see a patched lockdownd - I’ll look into patching it this weekend. In the meantime, here’s some screens of Google Maps’ location finder in action:

  

Lightweight, fast Rails stack - Thin & nginx

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.