On Sep 23, 2005, at 3:31 PM, SEan Wolfe wrote:

> I have an upcoming project that is for a news site with daily and  
> hourly content updates. Currently everything is done by static  
> HTML. Obviously it's a lot of work to get their stuff up there.
>
> I've had a great time working in Ruby and Rails of rother web  
> projects. But I'm just wondering if it's possible to do large scale  
> sites with RoR.
>
> The site needs to be able to handle a minimum of 200 req/sec. I'd  
> figure RoR, with a proper caching configuration, and maybe Squid in  
> front to do some short term page caching could possibly handle the  
> project, but I've never used RoR for anything this large. It' might  
> be possible since most of the site doen't need to keep a user  
> state, since it's only news pages, no logins (except for the  
> writers/editors which is a small fraction of the traffic).
>
> Has anyone had any success running sites this large or larger with  
> RoR? If so, were there any special requirements you needed to get  
> it running? Were more than one server needed for such applications?  
> What were the machine specs?
>
> Thanks for anyone's input.
>
> Sean
>

Hey Sean-
     I just finished and launched a similar site for the newspaper I  
work for last month. Here's the site: <http://yakimaherald.com>. I  
get about 55-60,000 hits a day right now I'm not sure offhand how  
many concurrent users at this time. But the traffick it serves right  
now is only taking up about 10-16% of my processing power on a dual  
2.3Ghz G5 xserve that is dedicated to the site. I started using  
apache1.3/fcgi but quickly switched to lighttpd/fcgi and it is  
working great and using much less cpu than apache did. Feel free to  
contact me off list if you want to discuss more details of what I am  
doing for caching strategies and all the different data sources I am  
collection data from.
     Here is a link to a more complete write up of the complexity of  
this application: <http://permalink.gmane.org/ 
gmane.comp.lang.ruby.rails/20637>. I describe most of dev process and  
trials and tribulations I went through in that post. Also I mention  
my deployment scheme. I also have very good config files for lighttpd  
and other aspects oif the install.

HTH-
-Ezra Zygmuntowicz
Yakima Herald-Republic
WebMaster
http://yakimaherald.com
509-577-7732
ezra / yakima-herald.com