Sinatra deployment and performance on Slicehost, Heroku, and Google App Engine

Monday 05/18/2009  –  Category: Uncategorized

During Railsconf I was anxious to see what all the hype was about Sinatra.  While attending Blake's Sinatra tutorial I ported the Flickr Original web service (originally in merb) to a nice and compact one-file Sinatra app.  It's really nice having everything as minimal as possible and in one file.

Now, deployment.

Slicehost
I guess Thin is the standard for deploying Sinatra apps (when did mongrel go out of style?). Deploying with Thin just involves setting up a config.yml with your working directory, paths to your pid, log, rackup file, ports, etc and then setting up nginx (or whatever web server you're using) accordingly as a proxy.  Deploying from scratch on Slicehost wasn't too bad...but some legwork is still required.

Heroku
I also tried deploying on Heroku.  Heroku makes it dead simple to deploy an app: after setting up an account, you just need create a Heroku app which creates a remote git repo that you can push to.  git push heroku automatically updates your code and redeploys your app.

Some things to note:

• If you have custom gems, you need to add them in a .gems file
• You can use your own domains by pointing a CNAME record to Heroku

Heroku makes it extremely easy to get something up and running extremely quickly.  You can have as many free projects as you want, so it can be used as a quick staging server for small projects.

Google App Engine
Deploying here was quite a bit more difficult (see previous post)...I had to modify more than a couple things to get stuff working completely on the App Engine infrastructure.  Luckily jruby and  the appengine sdk provide a number of scripts to pack and deploy your app.  GAE gives a nice dashboard of different metrics (req/s, ms/req, etc) as well as stats on your current load, logs, bandwidth, and more.

How does performance compare? Running the same ab test gave these results:

Not suprisingly, my 512slice came out on top, but Heroku wasn't far behind (blossom with 1 dyno)...can't beat that for the price of free-99.  Google App Engine was only able to serve half the requests per second. So until deploying on GAE gets more streamlined, I think I'll be deploying more apps to Heroku.