5 ms·

I am the author of this PaaS, I wanted to push this note on HN Monday to have time to answer the questions, but the cat escaped the box faster than I wanted. I

by Loic 15y ago

I am the author of this PaaS, I wanted to push this note on HN Monday to have time to answer the questions, but the cat escaped the box faster than I wanted. I am here to answer questions but do not expect "instant" answers.

lfittl 15y ago
I built a very similar PaaS with mongrel2 about a year ago (though all applications were untrusted and running inside an OpenVZ container) - only to change it to be nginx/HTTP-based because of stability. Great to see this technology is ready nowadays and can be used for production systems :)
- Loic 15y ago
  Mongrel2 is still beta, but with a good process supervisor, it still way more robust than a RoR setup from the early days. Once in a while, it can die, I still need to instrument a bit more to track the conditions where this is the case. On the other hand, ZMQ for the backend is just a pure pleasure and I haven't had a single failure of my components for more than 1 million real requests involving many ZMQ backend interactions.
  - lfittl 15y ago
    Interesting, my problems back then were actually ZMQ-related. Though to be fair, we were making it a bit complicated by suspending/resuming the OpenVZ containers. From that we sometimes got dead ZMQ connections that were black holing all traffic (incredibly hard to debug - ended up switching because of it).
    - Loic 15y ago
      OpenVZ is tricky, they are patching the kernel pretty deep and this creates a lot of hard to debug issues. I had a lot of troubles with containers running software mapping big files like MongoDB.
    - zedshaw 15y ago
      Yes, most of my crashes on the mongrel2 server I run come from ZeroMQ too. They fix them when I find them, but I actually run my servers under valgrind continually so I can catch them and report them.
dochtman 15y ago
Very nice post, thanks! I'm looking at experimenting with Mongrel2 to see if it would be a nice fit at work, where we still use apache2/mod_wsgi (we have modest needs) to interface our Python + CouchDB app. However, we've started adding WebSockets stuff to the system, and it would be nice to run everything in a slightly more coherent matter. We also use ZeroMQ to pump messages around the network (that later get converted into WebSockets frames for web frontend consumption). - Is mongrel2 getting good development? The latest release was in June, and the latest commit in the canonical repo seems to be from July... - Is there good support for RFC-version WebSockets yet? - Is there easy/performant stuff for simple asset serving via mongrel2, or should I use nginx for that?
- Loic 15y ago
  1. Zed is coding in bursts, check the develop branch, it is pretty active and a 1.8 is around the corner. 2. The same, in the develop branch, there are still some questions on how to best implement it like which parts must be done by the handlers and which by Mongrel2, but the coders involved are good and very pragmatic, I bet the results will be a high quality implementation. 3. http://notes.ceondo.com http://notes.ceondo.com is served by the "Dir" handler, that is, direct static files from disc without going through the asynchronous ZMQ based sequence. It is pretty fast.
  - tordek 15y ago
    Of note: There are several of us in #mongrel2 on Freenode, and there are periodic patches from us :).
- zedshaw 15y ago
  Hey, just a quick reply, that, yes I'm rather busy right now but I still squeeze in time for Mongrel2 and should be getting out a 1.8 beta soon.
- aidenn0 15y ago
  I've been working on the WebSockets support. I changed the handler <-> mongrel2 interface for websockets a bit, and I think I've reached the right point in the websockets-devel branch. If you are interested in websockets you can check out that branch and see what you think. If I get no negative feedback I'm merging it into the develop branch once I've tested it more
saturn 15y ago
Interesting username. Kind of reminds of me something... oh yeah, low orbit ion cannon, a DOS tool I have battled in the past. Looking forward to your explanation.
- silvertab 15y ago
  It's also a popular French name (I know 2 Loics personally...) No idea why this particular user uses this username but, it might not be for the reasons you think...
- Loic 15y ago
  My name is Loïc d'Anterroches. This relatively old, from disputed origin, French forename is not widely used. I can understand your reaction if reading my username brought memories of fighting against a DOS attack.
  - saturn 15y ago
    Wow, OK, sorry. I had no idea. Thanks for educating me.
- ceejayoz 15y ago
  I'm looking forward to your explanation of how you're posting from 10 AUs away from Earth.

by Loic 15y ago

lfittl 15y ago

I built a very similar PaaS with mongrel2 about a year ago (though all applications were untrusted and running inside an OpenVZ container) - only to change it to be nginx/HTTP-based because of stability. Great to see this technology is ready nowadays and can be used for production systems :)

Loic 15y ago
Mongrel2 is still beta, but with a good process supervisor, it still way more robust than a RoR setup from the early days. Once in a while, it can die, I still need to instrument a bit more to track the conditions where this is the case. On the other hand, ZMQ for the backend is just a pure pleasure and I haven't had a single failure of my components for more than 1 million real requests involving many ZMQ backend interactions.
- lfittl 15y ago
  Interesting, my problems back then were actually ZMQ-related. Though to be fair, we were making it a bit complicated by suspending/resuming the OpenVZ containers. From that we sometimes got dead ZMQ connections that were black holing all traffic (incredibly hard to debug - ended up switching because of it).
  - Loic 15y ago
    OpenVZ is tricky, they are patching the kernel pretty deep and this creates a lot of hard to debug issues. I had a lot of troubles with containers running software mapping big files like MongoDB.
  - zedshaw 15y ago
    Yes, most of my crashes on the mongrel2 server I run come from ZeroMQ too. They fix them when I find them, but I actually run my servers under valgrind continually so I can catch them and report them.

dochtman 15y ago

Very nice post, thanks! I'm looking at experimenting with Mongrel2 to see if it would be a nice fit at work, where we still use apache2/mod_wsgi (we have modest needs) to interface our Python + CouchDB app. However, we've started adding WebSockets stuff to the system, and it would be nice to run everything in a slightly more coherent matter. We also use ZeroMQ to pump messages around the network (that later get converted into WebSockets frames for web frontend consumption). - Is mongrel2 getting good development? The latest release was in June, and the latest commit in the canonical repo seems to be from July... - Is there good support for RFC-version WebSockets yet? - Is there easy/performant stuff for simple asset serving via mongrel2, or should I use nginx for that?

Loic 15y ago
1. Zed is coding in bursts, check the develop branch, it is pretty active and a 1.8 is around the corner. 2. The same, in the develop branch, there are still some questions on how to best implement it like which parts must be done by the handlers and which by Mongrel2, but the coders involved are good and very pragmatic, I bet the results will be a high quality implementation. 3. http://notes.ceondo.com http://notes.ceondo.com is served by the "Dir" handler, that is, direct static files from disc without going through the asynchronous ZMQ based sequence. It is pretty fast.
- tordek 15y ago
  Of note: There are several of us in #mongrel2 on Freenode, and there are periodic patches from us :).
zedshaw 15y ago
Hey, just a quick reply, that, yes I'm rather busy right now but I still squeeze in time for Mongrel2 and should be getting out a 1.8 beta soon.
aidenn0 15y ago
I've been working on the WebSockets support. I changed the handler <-> mongrel2 interface for websockets a bit, and I think I've reached the right point in the websockets-devel branch. If you are interested in websockets you can check out that branch and see what you think. If I get no negative feedback I'm merging it into the develop branch once I've tested it more

saturn 15y ago

Interesting username. Kind of reminds of me something... oh yeah, low orbit ion cannon, a DOS tool I have battled in the past. Looking forward to your explanation.

silvertab 15y ago
It's also a popular French name (I know 2 Loics personally...) No idea why this particular user uses this username but, it might not be for the reasons you think...
Loic 15y ago
My name is Loïc d'Anterroches. This relatively old, from disputed origin, French forename is not widely used. I can understand your reaction if reading my username brought memories of fighting against a DOS attack.
- saturn 15y ago
  Wow, OK, sorry. I had no idea. Thanks for educating me.
ceejayoz 15y ago
I'm looking forward to your explanation of how you're posting from 10 AUs away from Earth.