Thin The Fast Ruby Web Server

Today Mongrel is the defacto Ruby webserver of choice (watch Zed Shaw's, creator of Mongrel, presentation from QCon London 2007) . But a new experimental solution is now available under the name of Thin. Thin glues together three Ruby web libraries:

• The Mongrel parser (using Ragel) the root of Mongrel speed and security.
• Event Machine, a simple event-processing Ruby library that makes it possible to write scalable network I/O process.
• Rack, a minimal interface between web servers supporting Ruby and Ruby frameworks.

Marc-André Cournoyer made a presentation of Thin at latest Montreal on Rails showing the benefits of Thin.

The performance improvements can be significant with increases up to 25% for requests/s and around 15% less memory used, although the speed is dwarfed by the time spent in Rails.
Since 0.6.1 version in January Thin supports listening to UNIX sockets as well as to TCP/IP sockets, making it even faster.

Images by Marc-André Cournoyer

Thin already supports most Ruby Web Frameworks Rails, Merb, Camping, Sinatra, Ramaze, Vintage, Swiftiply.
Thin is a 3 months old project and it is worth a try before a production release is out.