Thin The Fast Ruby Web Server

by Sebastien Auvray on Feb 25, 2008 |

Today Mongrel is the defacto Ruby webserver of choice (watch Zed Shaw's, creator of Mongrel, presentation from QCon London 2007) . But a new experimental solution is now available under the name of Thin. Thin glues together three Ruby web libraries:

The Mongrel parser (using Ragel) the root of Mongrel speed and security.
Event Machine, a simple event-processing Ruby library that makes it possible to write scalable network I/O process.
Rack, a minimal interface between web servers supporting Ruby and Ruby frameworks.

Marc-André Cournoyer made a presentation of Thin at latest Montreal on Rails showing the benefits of Thin.

The performance improvements can be significant with increases up to 25% for requests/s and around 15% less memory used, although the speed is dwarfed by the time spent in Rails.
Since 0.6.1 version in January Thin supports listening to UNIX sockets as well as to TCP/IP sockets, making it even faster.

Images by Marc-André Cournoyer

Thin already supports most Ruby Web Frameworks Rails, Merb, Camping, Sinatra, Ramaze, Vintage, Swiftiply.
Thin is a 3 months old project and it is worth a try before a production release is out.

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Community comments

Testing with Thin looks good by Robert Dempsey Posted

Lighttpd by Jianzhi Wang Posted

Re: Lighttpd by Kirk Haines Posted

Running Thin on my server by John Griffiths Posted

Testing with Thin looks good by Robert Dempsey

We have been testing Thin using CentOS 5.1, Ruby 1.8.6, Rails 2.0.2, Nginx, and Thin. So far, we are seeing faster response times inline with the graphs presented by Marc-Andre. Very cool stuff.

Lighttpd by Jianzhi Wang

Does Thin run faster than Lighttpd+Fcgi?

Re: Lighttpd by Kirk Haines

Since nobody else has answered....

Maybe.

You really need to benchmark your application on your hardware to know for sure, but given that regular threaded Mongrel can be in the ballpark with lighttpd+fcgi in some deployments, faster solutions like evented_mongrel or Thin should be in the ballpark and competetive with fcgi in many deployments.

Running Thin on my server by John Griffiths

I had a play with THIN last week and so far have been pretty impressed about it's performance, much faster than mongrel and a lot less memory cost.

Wrote 2 articles on getting it installed which you can find on my blog...

www.red91.com

My setup is nginx, rails 2.0.2, ruby 1.8.6, mysql 5, Ubuntu 7.10 and of course THIN.

so far pretty sweet.