what happened to mongrel? any alternatives on windows?

Question

I've jus saw that mongrel's last updat was about one year ago...

http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/wiki/WikiStart?action=diff&version=35

has it been disontinued?

is there any other lightweight alternative for a windows development box?

Answer 1

Since mongrel hasnt been updated in such a long time there are certain features like --prefix which no longer work with the most reason version of rails (2.3+)

I would recommend using thin server instead as it seems to be the natural evolution of mongrel and the project maintainers are actively developing it.

Answer 2

Mongrel works fine in production for Windows and other OS. It's not being developed b/c it works fine for the majority of cases. There is still conversation periodically on the mongrel-users listserv about fixing this corner-case or that one. But my experience with mongrel is that it works great.

I tested thin a while back also and it works fine also. I did uncover a caching bug, but the maintainer posted a fix quickly, which was nice. I think if you found a bug in Mongrel, the current maintainers would also fix it quickly.

I did a comparison of thin vs mongrel here:

http://www.misuse.org/science/2008/04/07/thin-vs-mongrel-a-ruby-on-rails-performance-shootout/

And also another one looking at various pipelining techniques (nginx fair proxy module vs unix sockets). Thin does seem to exhibit some weird clustering behavior under heavy load - but that could be fixed by now.

http://www.misuse.org/science/2008/04/07/thin-ruby-on-rails-nginx-fair-proxy-performance-testing/

Answer 3

The original author Zed Shaw no longer maintains it, but it is still suitable for deploying rails applications on a workstation as an alternative to webrick (the Rails default).

If you're not using Windows as a production environment, I'd suggest setting up a VM configured w/ your production server's rails engine.