Archive: posts from September 2010

64-bit Brightboxes now available 29 Sep 10

From today, you can build 64-bit Lucid & Hardy Brightboxes! 64-bit boxes include the usual Brightbox Ruby/Rails stack and deployment tune-up, including our Ruby EE packages, atop a 64-bit userland and kernel.

Why use 64-bit?

There are a number of advantages to 64-bit architectures.

• Increased performance with >3GB of RAM – Addressing more than 3GB of RAM in userland on 32-bit linux requires the use a PAE which incurs a small performance overhead, this is not necessary with 64-bit. This can benefit applications that access large amounts of memory such as MySQL.
• Larger memory-mapped files – Particularly useful for a number of key-value/nosql databases such as Redis and others that use memory-mapped files for storage. MongoDB, for example, is limited to ~2.5GB of storage on 32-bit architectures.
• Certain number-crunching applications such as encryption and audio/video encoding can benefit greatly from access to 64-bit registers, offering considerable performance increases.

However, 64-bit isn’t always beneficial! In nearly all cases a 64-bit process will require (sometimes considerably) more memory than an identical 32-bit process due to larger pointers and other data-types occupying more space. This is particularly prevalent with Ruby where many of the internal data structures double in size when switching to 64-bit. Before deciding on 64-bit you should weigh up the pros and cons for your particular application.

Free upgrades for everyone! 27 Sep 10

50% extra RAM

Brightbox’s birthday is a matter of days away and we’re starting our fourth year by increasing RAM for all Brightboxes by 50%. We’ll be upgrading existing Brightboxes over the next couple of weeks, though the product names in the control panel will change straight away.

MySQL connection quotas doubled

Since you’ll now be able to fit more app processes on your Brightboxes, you’ll need more MySQL connections, so we’re doubling those for all products too.

New Relic RPM for all

And as if this wasn’t enough, we’re expanding our New Relic RPM offering to include all Brightbox sizes. See our wiki page for more details about getting it set up.

We’re taking the opportunity to rename our products too, as naming by RAM size starts to get a bit ugly when you move beyond powers of two. The table below shows how the products are being renamed and what your new RAM size will be. Happy birthday us!

We’ve got some other big things in the pipeline too, so stay tuned. The next few months are going to be great.

Update (19 October 2010): We have now completed these upgrades for all customers. The extra MySQL connections are already available to everyone. Customers who have not rebooted their Brightboxes recently will need to do so in order to start using their extra RAM.

Passenger 3.0.0 beta3 packages for Ubuntu Lucid and Hardy 21 Sep 10

The team at Phusion have been hard at work on Passenger 3 and last week released a beta version for testing. Continuing our work with Passenger 2, we’ve been working hard on packaging it.

We now have Passenger 3.0.0-pre3 packages available for Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) and Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy). As they’re pre-release versions, we don’t recommend them in production just yet and have put them in their own repository to prevent any accidental upgrades.

If you’re not already a Brightbox customer, then you’ll need to set up base access to our apt repository first.

Otherwise, just add the new passenger-testing repository (switch “lucid” to “hardy” if you’re on Hardy):

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://apt.brightbox.net lucid passenger-testing" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-passenger-testing.list'

Then you can upgrade/install 3.0.0-1bbox1~pre3

apt-get update
apt-get install libapache2-mod-passenger

Passenger now has a native library, which depends on your version of ruby. For simplicity, these packages currently require the ruby1.8 packages to be installed. You can, of course, switch to ruby1.9 and passenger will auto-compile the necessary native support for you. We’ll be providing packages for 1.9 support soon, so you won’t need to rely on the auto-compiling.

Rails 3 has landed! 9 Sep 10

After two years of hard work, the third generation of Rails is ready for the big time! Rails 3 brings about some major changes to make things all together “better, faster, cleaner, and more beautiful” and solve some of the common issues seen with Rails 2. Some of the major highlights include

Improved router syntax for Action Controller

The router syntax in Rails 3 has been completely revamped to build on the work from Rails 2 and provide a more elegant and flexible way to provide completely RESTful access for controllers. To get started see the new routing guide.

Brand new Action Mailer

Action Mailer was previously a bit of a hybrid, part controller, part model. Rails 3 sees Action Mailer completely rewritten purely as a controller, it now behaves much more like Action Controller. The new Action Mailer guide describes how to get going.

New query engine for Active Record

Active Record has adopted a new query engine to make complex queries more consistent and manageable. Execution of queries is now delayed until actually required and not when defined. For an introduction to the new query engine check out the new new Active Record guide.

Bundler

Traditionally, managing the dependencies for your Rails app deployment can be a bit of a nightmare. While Capistrano, Rake and other partial solutions make automating things easier, they’re often not elegant or simple. Bundler provides a complete solution to managing gems, libraries, frameworks and plugins that your app depends on. The latest release of the Brightbox deployment gem offers full support for Bundler.

Other improvements include built in XSS protection, an official plugins API, Agnosticism with plugins, Active Model callbacks & validations, better handling of character encoding and many more. For a more comprehensive list of changes see the release notes.

Rails 3 on your Brightboxes

Getting up and running with Rails 3 on your Brightboxes should be as simple as you’re used to with your existing Rails 2 apps.

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