Fast and Light

Once Tracks was running on Ruby on Rails, I tested it out a bit and shared the site with a friend who is "GTD" guy. His comment was that it was so slow. I did a little research on using Rails with Apache and one of the first hits was this article, which explained that the best solution (as of a year and a half ago) was to proxy Apache to lighttpd. I thought for a low volume server that the difference would be minor. I got Rails running with lighttpd and fast cgi, and wow, there was a huge difference. Apache was forcing pauses of one to three seconds, and lighttpd was nearly instantaneous. This difference made the difference between feeling like a web app and feel like a real app. There are apache improvements and there is a lot of buzz about Mongrel, but for now the lighttpd solution is a marked improvement.