Business today

"When the productive need to ask permission from the unproductive in order to produce, then you may know that your culture is doomed."-Ayn Rand

Specially true for IT business :)

Use mongrel handler for slow requests

I work in a industry where almost everything is a API call to a remote and slow system usually written in java. Rails is not at all the way to implement such things. I think the easiest way to implement this from ruby world is to write a mongrel handler.

class SleepHandler < Mongrel::HttpHandler
  def process(request, response)
    response.start do |head,out|
      head["Content-Type"] = "text/html"
      sleep 300 # Long running task
      out.write("test") # Push out the result
    end
  end
end

#Handler configs
config = Mongrel::Configurator.new :host => ARGV[0], :port => ARGV[1] do
  listener(:num_processors => 80, :timeout => 400) do
    uri "/sleep", :handler => SleepHandler.new
    uri "/nosleep", :handler => NoSleepHandler.new
  end

  trap("INT") { stop }
  run
end

puts "Mongrel running on #{ARGV[0]}:#{ARGV[1]} with docroot #{ARGV[2]}"
config.join

I stressed this mongrel handler with 50 concurrent requests and everything came back in 5 min and 45 secs and maximum memory comsumption was 32MB so in my view decent performance by mongrel.