Extremely slow.

[Tim Uckun]

I have set up switchpipe according to the instructions and am running
a rails application behind it. The problem I have having is that
switchpipe kills all the mongrel_rails processes once the timeout
period is reached. This means if you are reading a page for a few
seconds and then click a link the link has to launch mongrel all over
again which is very slow.

Is there a way to tell switchpipe to keep a number of mongrel alive no
matter what?

[Peter Cooper]

Yes. There's a min_instances option you can use to maintain a minimum
number of backends.

That said, it shouldn't be "extremely" slow, unless, of course, your
application is extremely slow to load. Admittedly most of the apps
I've been testing on are smallish, under 10 controllers, and typically
start on my server within 2 seconds. Using min_instances, however, the
effect of this is nearly un-noticeable since the permanently running
Mongrel can deal with the initial request while others are loading in
the background to meet other requests :)

Cheers,
Pete