The AppsLab

Mix President’s Day Release: JRuby 1.1RC2 and a bunch of other stuff!

By Rich Manalang • February 17th, 2008 • View Comments

Since U.S. based Oracle employees don’t get President’s Day off, Anthony and I decided to deploy some new changes while everyone is off enjoying their day off.  Actually, that’s not true, we deployed the new Mix changes early Sunday morning.  What should have taken 10 minutes lasted 2 hours — it was a big release.

We applied a ton of goodness on this latest update.  Under the hood, we upgraded to JRuby 1.1RC2 (which was just recently released (on Saturday!) — yeah, we’re blazing trails here.  We also upgraded a bunch of underlying libraries like ActiveRecord-JDBC, JREXML, Goldspike and a few others.  The JRuby 1.1RC2 upgrade was a big boost in performance.  Last week, I spent some time running some Apache Bench tests on my MacBook Pro (2.4 GHz/4Gb mem) and saw some AMAZING numbers.  Here’s a summary:

After running Apache Bench with 1000 requests (for my profile page) with a concurrency level of 100 (ab -n 1000 -c 100), I get these numbers:

Server Software:        Oracle
Server Hostname:        localhost
Server Port:            8888Document Path: /user_profiles/10023-rich-manalang
Document Length:        100 bytes

Concurrency Level:      100
Time taken for tests:   8.920769 seconds
Complete requests:      1000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Non-2xx responses:      1000
Total transferred:      549000 bytes
HTML transferred:       100000 bytes
Requests per second:    112.10 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       892.077 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       8.921 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          60.08 [Kbytes/sec] received

One thing to remember with these numbers… I ran this test on my laptop. Yes, I know what you’re saying… my laptop kicks your laptop’s arse. Regardless, these numbers look very good — here are a different set of stats for comparison.  For those interested, my Rails app was configured with the Goldspike default of 4 JRuby processes max-active and 2 min-idle.  I ran these against Oracle OC4J 10g, but the numbers look the same with Jetty and Glassfish. Charles Nutter one of the guys behind JRuby has a great write up on what’s next for JRuby.  It’s a great read if you’re considering JRuby for your next project.

Ok… so, for those who don’t care about the guts that run Mix, here’s a list of the other changes we’ve applied:

• New logged in homepage — this slick new home page is smart.  It delivers you topics that are relevant to you based on the tags and products you’ve specified on your profile.
  
• New post image identifiers — Jake didn’t like my handcrafted vote box from the last release (he said it looked like a Kleenex box… bastard), so I switched to the more standard “Vote” button.  I hope we don’t offend any non-”red-white-blue” users — if we do, sound off in the comments.  Here are the three post images… can you guess which is for which?
  
• More feeds! — Anthony’s added more feeds.  Anywhere you see that little orange button, click on it to subscribe to the feed for that view.
• Groups you may be interested in — Anthony whipped up a nice feature that looks at the tags and products you specified on your profile and matches it with groups you may want to be a part of.

We’re not stopping there.  Justin K and his crew have lots of features they want… so, we’ll be busy with that and lots of other enhancements in the next few weeks.  If you haven’t done so, get in the Mix. Oh, and if you have a feature you absolutely want, sound off in the comments or, better yet, put in an idea in the Mix group.

Possibly Related Posts

• Let’s Mix
• Mix Gets a Plug at Google
• Mix Listed on Ruby on Rails.org
• Mix, JRuby on Rails, Small Teams, Agile, and it’s Effects on the World
• JRuby Meetup!