Rubinius has support (as of today!) for running multiple instances of it’s VM within one process, each VM on it’s own *native* thread, each VM running many ruby green threads. Each VM has it’s own heap and so each VM could load different apps that wouldn’t interfere with each other. We have plans for a mod_rubinius for apache that takes full advantage of this feature. Stay tuned ;)
- Ezra Zygmuntowi on a comment on Ruby Inside.
Very interesting stuff. Why bother making Rails thread safe when you have an awesome Ruby VM such as Rubinius. I’d like to see Mongrel (or FastCGI! Bring back FastCGI!) make use of this somehow, running multiple Rails instances itself in one process and distributing requests between them. Interested in knowing how it’d deal with memory leaks in external libraries though (like rmagick suffers from).
Still, you lose finer grained access to most of the nice UNIX process management stuff though then, like limiting memory usage with ulimits, but nobody seems to be using that for Ruby deployment anyway. It’s all fiddling around with Monit and such instead (why always with the steps backward!).
John Leach is a human being living in Leeds, UK.