For anyone who has run multiple instances of Rails on the same server, as is common within the frugal budgets of corporate IT departments, then you will have run into a limitation of resource allocation, typically memory. The Ruby community likes to defend their language’s performance tradeoffs by reminding us all that hardware is cheap, or at least cheaper than your developer’s time. While I agree that hardware is cheap, cheaper still is not buying more hardware than necessary and instead find new ways to use your limited resources efficiently. The folks at Phusion have similar concerns, which is why they have developed the Ruby Enterprise Edition.
Ruby Enterprise Edition is a forked version of the Ruby on Rails web framework. For those not familiar with the software practice, forking is taking existing source code, usually open source, and branching off your own version in your own direction. Programming communities discourage excessive forking because it waters down the developers focused on the original project. However, when a group has different goals than the original, it can be the quickest and least painful way to accomplish that goal.
The goal of the Phusion group who created Ruby Enterprise Edition was to directly address the memory sharing practice of multiple instances on the same hardware. Technical details can be found here For those business users who have issued one server to be their company’s ‘Rails Application Server’, this fork may become a standard deploy. It purports to save 33% of the memory typically allocated with the parent version of Rails. As the fork is compliant with 1.8.6, you can run all of your recently created web applications unless they were developed against edge rails for the very recent release of 2.0 or 2.1 Forks typically lag behind parent source code in feature support, but there is no reason to doubt Enterprise Edition will not support 2.0 soon
Phusion has not rested on this solution for improved corporate rails hosting. They have already also developed a module for Apache called Passenger (also called mod_rails). Apache Modules like this have made languages like PHP a brain-dead easy solution for developers and programmers to get web apps up and running. As I have said earlier, Rails suffered from a complex set of options for hosting. Mod_Rails really takes that issue out of the equation. Couple Passenger with Enterprise Edition and you have a well thought out corporate solution for your growing number of Rails applications
Personally, we are looking to use the Enterprise Edition / Passenger combination on an web application we developed internally. It is exactly what we need to expand deployments of unique instances without overcompensating with more hardware investments.
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