Upcoming Ruby Enterprise Edition improvements thanks to sponsorship campaign
Wow, the community has been on fire lately. 6 months after the first introduction of Phusion Passenger (our Rails deployment utility) and Ruby Enterprise Edition (which, in combination with Phusion Passenger, allows one’s Rails applications to use 33% less memory), people are still saying good things about us. 
Tobias Lütke from Shopify has given us a lot of praise:
“At the same time Passenger introduced some tangible improvements. We switched to enterprise ruby to get the full benefit of the [Copy-On-Write] memory characteristics and we can absolutely confirm the memory savings of 30% some others have reported. This is many thousand dollars of savings even at today’s hardware prices.”
Not only that, 37signals has recently switched Ta-da List to Phusion Passenger. According to DHH, their system administrators have been very content with Phusion Passenger.
But there’s more.
We’ve been talking with DHH from 37signals about a sponsorship campaign for supporting the development of REE. We just received words that all funds have been secured. In the mean time, we had been working hard on developing REE, and so we will be releasing the improvements as well as announcing the sponsors in the very near future. The improvements are, in a nutshell:
- Integration with the RailsBench GC patches, allowing one to tweak the garbage collector for maximum performance.
- Better MacOS X support.
- Better 64-bit support.
- Better Solaris support.
Thank you, 37signals and other sponsors!
Stay tuned for more news.
Egze said,
November 23, 2008 @ 1:21 pm
Great news!
Unfortunately, I recently had to switch back from REE, because it didn’t have Xapian bindings (I use acts_as_xapian for search) and I have no idea how to compile then. Any ideas?
I need these 2 packages to work with REE: libxapian15 libxapian-ruby1.8
Hongli said,
November 23, 2008 @ 1:57 pm
It should work exactly like any other Ruby library. You just need to make sure it’s compiled/installed against REE instead of your system’s Ruby. Please refer to Xapian’s installation manual.
Peter Cooper said,
November 23, 2008 @ 3:45 pm
Do you have any plans or a facility for more casual donations towards your cause? I ask, because a lot of people don’t read DHH’s Twitter account, or would like to donate (but not sponsor, as such) smaller amounts out of appreciation, etc. Also, Passenger might be getting a mention on Ruby Inside soon and it’d be interesting to see whether a lot of people would be keen on donating. If you have a PayPal account, I imagine it should be easy to rig up. Just PayPal on its own, or through something like Pledgie: http://www.pledgie.com/
David Reese said,
November 23, 2008 @ 6:12 pm
Hi
Following DHH’s lead…
I’d like to propose a new round of donations to the “Rename Ruby Enterprise Edition” fund. How much would it take to have you take the “enterprise” out of the name? What about “Two feet one ruby slipper”?
I think I speak for a lot of us in rubyland who would never install ANYTHING with the word “enterprise” in the name…
Dan Haskins said,
November 23, 2008 @ 7:39 pm
@David Reese: It’s totally your loss then. I just started using Passenger with Ruby Enterprise about a week ago and I have been incredibly happy with it so far. I don’t care what it’s called as long as it works.
Sur said,
November 24, 2008 @ 3:56 am
it’s been a good experience using R2E + Passenger. I’ve not faced any problem with any of the libraries.
Thanks for your great work, Hongli & Ninh.
gnufied said,
November 24, 2008 @ 1:44 pm
I have been following this on ruby-core for a long time and reason given by Matz and others at that time was it slows down Ruby (but COW can be turned on and off). Apart from GC, is there a summary of changes it makes to ruby?
Hongli said,
November 24, 2008 @ 5:06 pm
@Peter Cooper: Yes we do accept small donations. There’s a Donation page on the Ruby Enterprise Edition website.
Cool that you’re going to mention Phusion Passenger. If you need our Paypal address, it’s info@phusion.nl.
@gnufied: Ruby Enterprise Edition currently has:
- Copy-on-write garbage collector optimizations.
- The tcmalloc memory allocator. This memory allocator proved to be beneficial to performance and copy-on-write semantics.
- Packaging (i.e. an installer).
The next version will also include:
- Philippe Hanrigou’s caller_for_all_threads patch. Phusion Passenger will support this feature as well. This should make it a lot easier to debug frozen multi-threaded web applications.
- The RailsBench GC patches, allowing one to tweak the garbage collector’s performance.