Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.7-2010.01 released

By Hongli Lai January 20th, 2010

What is Ruby Enterprise Edition?

Ruby Enterprise Edition (REE) is a server-oriented distribution of the official Ruby interpreter, and includes various additional enhancements, such as:

REE can be easily installed in parallel to your existing Ruby interpreter, allowing you switch to REE with minimal hassle or risk. REE has been out for about a year now and is already used by many high-profile websites and organizations, such as New York Times, Shopify and 37signals.

“We switched to enterprise ruby to get the full benefit of the [copy-on-write] memory characteristics and we can absolutely confirm the memory savings of 30% some others have reported. This is many thousand dollars of savings even at today’s hardware prices.”
– Tobias Lütke (Shopify)

Ruby Enterprise Edition is 100% open source.

Changes

Upgraded to Ruby 1.8.7-p248
The previous REE release was based on 1.8.7-p174.
Improved compiler optimization options
The previous REE release was compiled with -Os -fno-strict-aliasing.

-fno-strict-aliasing was used to avoid improper code generation by GCC 4.4. This was actually caused by some aliasing bugs in Ruby’s util.c source file. The problems have been fixed in 1.8.7-p174 so we’ve now removed this compilation flag, allowing for better compiler optimizations.

It turned out that -O2 yields better performance than -Os in many production environments, though some microbenchmarks might indicate otherwise. Therefore we’ve now replaced -Os with -O2.

Fixed OpenSSL extension compilation problems on systems with OpenSSL 1.0
At this time, upstream Ruby cannot be compiled on systems with OpenSSL 1.0 because of compatibility problems in the Ruby OpenSSL extension. Fedora 12 includes OpenSSL 1.0. We’ve applied a patch by the Fedora guys and added some minor changes to fix some compilation warnings. These patches have been send upstream. Ruby issue #2022.
Backported an IO#write exception bug fix
Upstream Ruby 1.8.7-p248 has a bug in its IO#write method: it always raises Errno::EINVAL even when a different error occured. We found this problem while testing Phusion Passenger on this Ruby release.

We’ve submitted a patch upstream. This patch is also applied in this REE release.

Thread timer fix now merged upstream
Previous REE releases included Joe Damato’s and Aman Gupta’s thread timer fix. This fix has now found its way back upstream and is included by default in 1.8.7-p248, so we’ve removed the patch from our source tree.
Fix a crash bug in the zero-copy context switching patch set
This crash can be reproduced by running “god”, which will eventually cause a crash. Aman Gupta has fixed this problem.

Please note that the zero-copy context switching patch set is disabled by default, and must be explicitly enabled by passing –fast-threading to the installer. It is currently still marked as experimental because there are some known issues with the Kernel::fork method. Issue #9.

Ubuntu package now contains debugging symbols
Previous REE Ubuntu packages that we release had binaries with debugging symbols stripped, in order to minimize the package sizes. We no longer strip the debugging symbols now because Joe and Aman’s Memprof depends on the presence of debugging symbols. Memprof should work out-of-the-box with this release of REE.

Please note that although the binaries are larger, this does not affect performance in any way. The debugging symbols are only used for debugging and introspection purposes and do not affect the runtime behavior of Ruby at all.

Developer documentation is now installed by default
RDoc and RI documentation are now installed by default. You can avoid this by passing --no-dev-docs to the installer.

The Ubuntu packages include developer documentation.

Installer now checks for the existence of the ‘patch’ utility
This fixes bug #10.
Some documentation updates
Parts are contributed by Trevor Turk.

Download & upgrade

To install Ruby Enterprise Edition, please visit the download page. To upgrade from a previous version, simply install into the same prefix that you installed to last time. Please also refer to the documentation for upgrade instructions.

Ruby Enterprise Edition | Comments (3)

Phusion Passenger 2.2.9 released

By Hongli Lai January 8th, 2010

Phusion Passenger is an Apache and Nginx module for deploying Ruby on Rails web applications, and is mainly focused on ease of use and stability.

Recent changes

Phusion Passenger is under constant maintenance and development. We are pleased to announce Phusion Passenger version 2.2.9. This is a bug fix release.

Fixed compatibility with Rails 3.

Actually, previous Phusion Passenger releases were already compatible with Rails 3, depending on the spawn method that would be invoked. Here’s the story:

Since Phusion Passenger 2.2.8, when the file config.ru exists, Phusion Passenger will treat the app as a Rack app, not as a Rails app. This is in contrast to earlier versions which gave Rails detection more priority than Rack detection. Phusion Passenger loads Rack apps and Rails apps in different ways. The Rails loader was not compatible with Rails 3, which is what we’ve fixed in this release.

That said, a Rails 3 app would have worked out-of-the-box on Phusion Passenger 2.2.8 as well because Rails 3 apps include a config.ru file by default, causing Phusion Passenger 2.2.8 to use the Rack loader. Earlier versions of Phusion Passenger would just completely bail out because they’d use the Rails loader.

With 2.2.9 there are still some caveats:

  • Smart spawning (the mechanism with which REE’s 33% memory reduction is implemented) is *not* supported for Rack apps. This means that if you want to utilize smart spawning with Rails 3, then you should remove your config.ru file.
  • Rails 3 depends on Rack 1.1.0. You must have Rack 1.1.0 installed as a gem, even if you’ve bundled it with the gem bundler. This is because Phusion Passenger itself depends on Rack.

Both of these caveats are temporary. We have plans to solve both of these properly in the future.

What’s up with the Gem Bundler?

There has been some reports that Phusion Passenger is not compatible with Yehuda Katz’s gem bundler. This might have been true for an earlier version of the gem bundler, but the latest version seems to work fine. Please note that you need to insert the following snippet in config/preinitializer.rb, as instructed by the gem bundler’s README:

require "#{RAILS_ROOT}/vendor/gems/environment"

The Rails::Boot monkey patching code as posted here does not seem to be required anymore.

Fixed support for ActiveRecord subclasses that connect to another database.
ActiveRecord subclasses that connect to a database other than the default one did not have their connection correctly cleared after forking. This can result in weird errors along the lines of "Lost connection to MySQL server during query". Issue #429.
[Nginx] Fixed PCRE URL.
passenger-install-nginx-module downloads PCRE 7.8 if PCRE is not already installed. However PCRE 7.8 has been removed from their FTP server, so we’ve updated the URL to point to the latest version, 8.0.

How do I upgrade to 2.2.9?

Via a gem

Please install it with the following command:

gem install passenger

Next, run:

passenger-install-apache2-module

Or, if you’re an Nginx user:

passenger-install-nginx-module

Please don’t forget to copy & paste the Apache/Nginx config snippet that the installer gives you.

Via a native Linux package

John Leach from Brightbox has kindly provided an Ubuntu 8.04 package for Phusion Passenger. The package is available from the Brightbox repository which you can find at:

http://apt.brightbox.net

Add the following line to the Third Party Software Sources:

deb http://apt.brightbox.net hardy main

(The simplest way to do that is to create a file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ containing the deb instruction, and then run ‘apt-get update’).

Once you’ve done this then you can install Phusion Passenger by running:

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-passenger

-or-

sudo apt-get install nginx-brightbox

(Note that John is currently packaging 2.2.9, so it might take a while before this release shows up in the apt repository.)

Final

Phusion Passenger is provided to the community for free. If you like Phusion Passenger, please consider sending us a donation. Thank you!

Phusion Passenger | Comments (5)