On Feb 27, 2007, at 4:36 PM, Roger Pack wrote:
> So...apparently webrick does the following for serving pages:
> loads the page into a string object
> then sends that string to the requestor.
> Unfortunately this means that if it is a very large file being served
> that that buffer string will get very large.  I.e. with a 700MB  
> file it
> will fail because Ruby runs out of memory.  This fact also defeats the
> 'streaming' aspect of some ruby functions, for example the RoR  
> send_file
> has an option to send a file 'a chunk at a time' to the client-- 
> however
> these chunks are all conglomerated within webrick then sent--so it
> doesn't stream out as it hoped to be doing.  I therefore see this as a
> bug in Webrick and was wondering what others thought.
> Cheers!
> -Roger

I doubt Webrick was ever really intended for that sort of work.  You  
could try Mongrel, although it may yield the same result.  Rock solid  
ruby deployment is still something of a work in progress, I feel.
-Mat