Informal notes from #frozenrails 2010

Thanks to organisers from Kisko Labs and the HHLinuxClub on Friday, May 7th, 2010 Finland got its first  Rails conference.

Conference has drawn very interesting speakers and  international crowd – from Finland (naturally), Sweden, Poland, Germany, Russia and other countries. I made a few notes from selected talks on the conference.

Chris Wanstrath / GitHub (@defunkt)

  • Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/err/inside-github
  • Linus Trovalds Google tech talk about git – where Linus tell you that you’re stpid if you’re not using git
  • rack-mobile-detect – is used by GitHub, super useful if you’re planning to create mobile optimized version
  • GitHub uses Unicorn as an application server – personally I’m not sure if that’s better than Apache + Passenger. Chris tells that Unicorn is cool, because does fair load balancing on Linux kernel level, also Rails are loaded only once – and then required number of processes are forked – and this is very fast, a lot faster than loading rails separately for each Mongrel. And when one of the processes dies – there’s no need to re-load Rails, but just fork another process.
  • GitHub users BERT to forward requests to one of their six servers – BERT to Erlang is the same as JSON to JavaScript
  • GitHub doesn’t use delayed_job anymore since they needed several queues with different priorities – so far they use resque, but are considering developing a real queue management system

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