Rails+mongrel - why VPS has ruby 1.8.5 when 1.8.4 required?

[lorrimanhg]

Hi Folks,

My new VPS was installed with ruby 1.8.5 and the latest mongrel. However mongrel requires ruby 1.8.4 for stability, and there are lots of reports of problems for those who have strayed from 1.8.4.

Has RimuHosting fixed the trouble, or should I be uninstalling ruby and getting myself 1.8.4? I'd rather not.

[lorrimanhg]

Well, I downgraded: I don't want a flaky site.

I've noticed a marginal decrease in performance.

I've also noticed, before the downgrade, that more than 1 mongrel under ruby 1.8.5 decreased performance by about 15% (using ab and openload). However my tests were highly variable (fast for one, slow for another - I;ve taken the average). The reason for trying is that I don't need the concurrency (no long queries and the VPS is single processor, I think)

With 1.8.4 (compiled with pthreads) adding a mongrel increases throughput by 50% to about the same as a two mongrel 1.8.5 cluster. Only 1 mongrel was stupendously slow compared to the same under 1.8.5.