Is lighttpd supported on HMS? If so, is there a tutorial or support doc with HMS-specific settings?

I have a rails app here @ HMS and I'm happy with the stability, but it loads a bit slowly compared to one I'm hosting on textdrive with Apache proxying to lighttpd.

Thanks.

We really can't support lighttpd at this time. What we would really like to do is get a way to offer Rails with Apache 2.2/mod_proxy_balancer/mongrel_cluster, but its going to be fairly difficult to do that

We can definitely put you on a list of people to notify if/when we're able to put together a mongrel solution, but for the time being that looks to be fairly distant future - we're just starting to work with mongrel_cluster internally and with dedicated customers. Getting any sort of automated way to use it, and even verifying whether the resources it uses would make that a possiblity, are a long ways off

Thanks for the honest answer. I'd like to be on the mongrel list for a heads up, even if it's not on the near horizon.

The client hasn't complained about the speed of the site, but I've noticed it's appreciable slower than Rails on lighttpd.

Definetly, I would like to see mongrel with shared hosting... I think it would be important to have a community collaboration page for the upcoming projects if possible, to get a sense for what the options are.

comprug - Definitely. There's a bunch of things on the radar. We will try to get a publically accessible page together to show what we're considering and what our status with them is, and maybe allow people to offer some comments or input on those as well

This may sound like a foolish question, but you've put your site in Production mode through environment.rb, haven't you?

I believe the servers still run in Dev by default.

Yes, thanks.

I've had the same experience. The Rails apps I'm running here (under FCGI) aren't as fast as the couple I've still got hanging on at TextDrive, but the stability here is great. I'd definitely pay more monthly ($5 or so over the price of Builder) for a Rails-specific plan that was Apache2.2/mod_proxy_balancer/mongrel_cluster, even if it only allowed for one or two mongrels. (FYI, I've got Apache2.0 proxying over to a single Mongrel for each site over at TextDrive, and it's smokin'.)

The community-accepted wisdom is that an average Mongrel instance runs somewhere between 25 and 40 MB of RAM (vs. 20-25 MB for FCGI), and that's running Typo, which is still pretty memory-leaky. So, HMS could bump up prices a bit and put all of us Rails nerds on a common platform (easy for me to say...). Now the question is how many of us would be interested in a solution like that?