Ryan Tomayko

Unicorn! —

GitHub documents the how and why behind their Unicorn setup. Also, for the record, the fork(2) + shared accept socket technique described in my Unicorn is Unix piece was first explained to me by Chris and Tom.

Unicorn's signal handling —

Unicorn is a newish Rack-based HTTP server that’s kinda sorta like Mongrel but comes packed with some insane process management features. The main link is to the SIGNALS file, which documents the master/worker process model, supported signals, process replacement, failover, etc. See the README for a high level description of features.

This link brought to you by @defunkt, who explained Unicorn’s unique approach (repeatedly) over the course of a week.

Backlogs and Request Time —

Adam takes a look at how long requests and backlog interact. The sleep example runs concurrently under Mongrel but Thin and WEBrick will backlog.

GitHub: mongrel_proctitle GemPlugin —

I repackaged mongrel_proctitle as a GemPlugin so that all mongrels on use it automatically. This is the first chance I’ve had to play with GitHub, too. Lovin' it.

Process title support for Mongrel —

Constantly updates the the process title ($0) with something like: “mongrel_rails [10010/2/358]: handling 127.0.0.1: HEAD /feed/calendar/global/91/6de4”. Let’s you monitor backends with ps and top.

What Mongrel Isn't (Or, Write Your Own Damn Web Server) —

“All you have to do is change the internal processing, add 200 more methods to the HTTP parser, serve Bittorrent over Ethernet, and have it save Korean orphans while eating a Mango in the back seat of an El Camino driven by twenty midget clowns.”