01 December 2006
Pastures New
Last Thursday was my last day working for Agile Evolved. I enjoyed my time at AE and want to say thanks to Jonathan for employing me in the first place and giving me the opportunity to grow as a programmer, work full-time with Ruby and Rails, contribute to the open-source community and to become an active part of the London Ruby community. Good luck to everybody at Agile Evolved!
The new job
This Monday I started my new job as Head of Software Development for a London-based media company. Unfortunately, at the request of my employers I’m unable to say who I am working for—don’t get excited, it isn’t anybody you would have heard of anyway (probably) but I am really excited about the challenges I will be facing over the coming months.
Obviously there is little I can say about what I will be working on at this moment in time but needless to say we will be fully utilizing the power of Ruby and RubyOnRails and other open source software on several large-scale projects in what could be one of the largest-scale deployments of a Ruby/Rails application. Exciting stuff! I’ll try and post information on how we are using Ruby whenever I possibly can, confidentiality and approval from our PR department pending of course.
Project updates
Some of you may be wondering where this leaves the numerous open-source projects that I am working on. Naturally, I will be very busy over the coming months but I was keen to stress that how important contributing to open-source software was to my new employers and I have their full support so my involvement will continue pretty much as it is, as will my participation in the Ruby community…I’ll have to drag our CTO (aka my boss) down to the next LRUG meeting.
Dan and I will do our best to get a new release of UJS out of the door before the end of the year. It is most likely that we will put back any new features to a 0.5 release and concentrate on bugs and Rails 1.2 compatibility for 0.4. My work on ActiveSpec will most likely be put off until the new year now. Meanwhile, James and I are almost ready with the official Rails plugin repository—it should hopefully be ready in time for the Rails 1.2 final release.
I’m also happy to announce that I have officially joined the RSpec development team. My initial contributions will likely be towards the RSpec TextMate bundle but I hope to get even more involved in the new year.
And finally…
On the subject of moving on, I recently moved my blog from Site5 to a Rimuhosting VPS. Site5 weren’t bad for a shared host but they had no Mongrel support and frankly FastCGI and Rails is just painful.
For those interested in my setup, I have two allocated IP addresses – I’m running Nginx on one IP as a proxy to Mongrel for any Rails apps (currently just this blog) and lighttpd on the second IP address for serving up any static content or PHP apps that I might need (such as Mint Stats and Roundcube Webmail). The setup works well and was easy to get up and running—not having to use Apache 2.2 also saves me plenty of resources which is great because I only have 160MB of RAM to play with on my current plan.
I really recommend a VPS if you are running Rails apps and Rimuhosting are very good value for money. The only pain for me was setting up my mail server with Postfix, Dovecot and SpamAssassin which was a new and painful experience for me. I got there in the end though and I can now have my own Subversion repositories and I will eventually have an instance of Trac up and running for my various open-source projects. Stay tuned!
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7 Comments on this article
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1. Comment by Labrat on 01 Dec 2006 at 13:12
Congratulations on the new job!
I’d be curious to know specifically how much resources (RAM) are consumed by Mephisto under rimuhosting since I’m currently thinking of migrating to mephisto from dream(nightmare)host * to rimu as well. Of course, only if you don’t mind.
2. Comment by Luke Redpath on 01 Dec 2006 at 14:12
Well, Mongrel can be quite resource hungry (so are Rails apps in general) so I’m only running a single mongrel process for my blog – thats fine as the only stuff that hits the Rails app is commenting, some of the home page stuff and the admin interface. The rest is all cached.
I’m currently using about 130 of my 160MB. Bear in mind that I’m running SpamAssassin which is quite resource hungry.
According to ps, the most memory intensive processes on my VPS are (in percentage of usage):
MySQL – 6.8% PHP FCGIs – 10% Mongrel (this blog) – 25.6% SpamAssassin (spamd) – 40%
Its worth noting that lighty and nginx combined aren’t taking up more than 2%.
3. Comment by Pratik on 01 Dec 2006 at 16:12
Congrats on your new job first of all :-)
Also, just wondering if have you tried Litespeed’s Ruby LSAPI. That’ll give you same performance as ngnix+mongrel and no need of running a seperate server for PHP. Be sure to check it out in case you haven’t!
4. Comment by labrat on 01 Dec 2006 at 19:12
Thanks for sharing that. I have a test app that only 3 people on earth probably know about running nginx/3 mongrels w/ 128MB on rimu and those three are consuming and 26%, 23%, and 1.5% with mysql taking up 4%. I haven’t done anything to optimize it yet though.
Don’t want to clutter up your comments. I think I’ll do some rough comparisons using the apache benchmark tool. Not this blog of course.
cheers.
5. Comment by Jonathan on 02 Dec 2006 at 22:12
All the best for the future mate! See you at the next LRUG meetup.
6. Comment by Peter Cooper on 06 Dec 2006 at 01:12
Good luck, sir!
7. Comment by Martin on 12 Dec 2006 at 16:12
Congrats Luke! Certainly sounds exciting. It’s also great to hear you will be joining the RSpec team. I look forward to developments over the coming months. Martin.