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.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2010.02 Packages for Ubuntu Hardy & Lucid 16 Jun 10

We’ve built new 32 & 64bit Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2010.02 packages for Ubuntu Hardy and Lucid. The 2010.02 release of Ruby EE includes a number of backported fixes for critical bugs in Ruby 1.8.7p249 and we recommend users currently using our 2010.01 packages upgrade immediately.

For further information on using these packages see the release announcement for our Ruby EE 2010.01 packages.

Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2010.01 Packages for Ubuntu Hardy & Lucid 17 May 10

We’ve built  new 32bit and 64bit Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2010.01 packages for Ubuntu Hardy and Lucid. The new packages are now the default on new Lucid beta boxes. For Hardy, as before these packages are quite a major change from the default Hardy Ruby interpreter,which is 1.8.6, so we recommend you test thoroughly before putting it into production.

As with our other Ruby EE packages, they upgrade (i.e replace) the standard 1.8 Ruby installation. This means all your gems stay the same, and everything on your system immediately starts using them (Phusion’s own Ubuntu packages do not work like this).

These packages are also the best way to get Ruby 1.8.7 on Hardy, which you’ll need if you’re playing with Rails 3.

If you’re on a Hardy based Brightbox, just create or edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-rubyee.list to contain the rubyee-testing component like so:

deb http://apt.brightbox.net/ hardy rubyee-testing

If you’re on one of our Lucid beta boxes provisioned before today, simply create /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-rubyee.list and add the rubyee component:

deb http://apt.brightbox.net/ lucid rubyee

Finally, update and upgrade libruby1.8:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libruby1.8 irb1.8 libopenssl-ruby1.8 libreadline-ruby1.8 rdoc1.8 ruby1.8

If you’re not on a Brightbox, see the instructions on our wiki first. The wiki also documents how to revert back to the old packages.

Passenger 2.2.10 packages for Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy 26 Feb 10

Phusion released Passenger 2.2.10 this week, fixing some bundler compatibility bugs and a file descriptor bug that could lead to “mysterious crashes”.

We’ve built our Ubuntu Hardy packages for i386 and AMD64 architectures which are now available from the Brightbox apt repository.  We’ve also upgraded our librack-ruby packages to 1.1.0.

Passenger 2.2.9 packages for Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy 8 Jan 10

The Phusion team released Passenger 2.2.9 today, which adds support for Rails 3, the GEM bundler, and fixes a couple of bugs.  As usual Brightbox are providing Ubuntu Hardy packages for i386 and AMD64 architectures, available now from the Brightbox apt repository.

This package won’t actually support Rails 3 just yet though as we’ve yet to package and test the librack 1.1.0, which Rails 3 depends on.  We’re working on it now and once we’re happy with it we’ll add new packages to our repository as usual.

Apache x-sendfile module for Ubuntu Hardy 22 Dec 09

We’ve just added Caspar Clemens Mierau‘s package for the Apache x-sendfile module to our Ubuntu Hardy package repositories, so now it’s trivially easy for Brightbox customers to start using it. We’ve also built an AMD64 version too.  Just install the package, enable it and reload Apache:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-xsendfile
sudo a2enmod xsendfile
sudo invoke-rc.d apache reload

Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2009.10 Packages for Ubuntu Hardy 9 Nov 09

We’ve built 32bit and 64bit Ubuntu Hardy packages for Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2009.10.  These packages are still in beta, and this is quite a major change from the default Hardy Ruby interpreter,which is 1.8.6, so we recommend you test thoroughly before putting it into production.  We’ve been using them for a couple of days with no problems though.

As with our other Ruby EE packages, they upgrade (i.e replace) the standard 1.8 Ruby installation. This means all your gems stay the same, and everything on your system immediately starts using them (Phusion’s own Ubuntu packages do not work like this).  We’ve tested it with the usual Railsy native gems, RMagick, Mongrel, fasthread etc. and have had no problems.

If you’re on a Brightbox, just edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-rubyee.list and change the rubyee component to rubyee-testing:

deb http://apt.brightbox.net/ hardy rubyee-testing

Then update and upgrade:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libruby1.8

If you’re not on a Brightbox, see the instructions on our wiki first. The wiki also documents how to revert back to the old packages.

As said above, we now have 64bit packages available too (which was recently made easier by some Debian package dependency updates, also included in our repository).

Please let us know how they worked out for you on our forum. Thanks!

Passenger 2.2.2 packages for Ubuntu 1 May 09

Passenger 2.2.2 was released a few days ago and we now have a package available for Ubuntu Hardy.  After a lot of testing, we’re also happy with the recent packaging changes so this is going straight to our stable repository.

This new version of Passenger brings a train-load of NGINX fixes, so our Passenger enabled nginx-brightbox package has been updated too and is available in our testing repository.  More details on using our testing repository here in the 2.2.1 announcement blog post.

Phusion Passenger 2.1.2 packages for Ubuntu 14 Mar 09

Following Friday’s release of Passenger 2.1.2 by the Phusion folks, we’ve updated our Ubuntu packages.  We’ve been testing version 2.1.1 packages for a little while now and they’ve been very stable, supporting both Rails 2.3 and older apps that still depend on Rack 0.4 (such as older Sinatra apps).

The details are on the usual page on our wiki.  If you have any problems or need any help, try our forums.

The new packages depend on new versions of the Ruby rack libraries (not the gem), but this is provided in our repository too and will be automatically installed. You need to install the fastthread gem yourself though.  Our repository provides a few other useful Hardy packages too.

We are only testing our packages against Ubuntu Hardy right now, but they should install and run fine on newer versions of Ubuntu too.

Remember, for maximum memory savings (and speed improvements) try our Ruby Enterprise Edition packages for Ubuntu Hardy (currently only 32bit packages available).