Reel is a fast, non-blocking "evented" web server built on http_parser.rb, websocket_parser, Celluloid::IO, and nio4r. Thanks to Celluloid, Reel also works great for multithreaded applications and provides traditional multithreaded blocking I/O support too.
Connections to Reel can be either non-blocking and handled entirely within the Reel::Server thread, or the same connections can be dispatched to worker threads where they will perform ordinary blocking IO. Reel provides no built-in thread pool, however you can build one yourself using Celluloid.pool, or because Celluloid already pools threads to begin with, you can simply use an actor per connection.
This gives you the best of both worlds: non-blocking I/O for when you're primarily I/O bound, and threads for where you're compute bound.
Here's a "hello world" web server benchmark, run on a 2GHz i7 (OS X 10.7.3). All servers used in a single-threaded mode.
Reel performance on various Ruby VMs:
# httperf --num-conns=50 --num-calls=1000
Ruby Version Throughput Latency
------------ ---------- -------
JRuby HEAD 5650 reqs/s (0.2 ms/req)
Ruby 1.9.3 5263 reqs/s (0.2 ms/req)
JRuby 1.6.7 4303 reqs/s (0.2 ms/req)
rbx HEAD 2288 reqs/s (0.4 ms/req)
Comparison with other web servers:
Web Server Throughput Latency
---------- ---------- -------
Goliath (0.9.4) 2058 reqs/s (0.5 ms/req)
Thin (1.2.11) 7502 reqs/s (0.1 ms/req)
Node.js (0.6.5) 11735 reqs/s (0.1 ms/req)
All Ruby benchmarks done on Ruby 1.9.3. Latencies given are average-per-request and are not amortized across all concurrent requests.
Reel provides an extremely simple API:
require 'reel'
Reel::Server.supervise("0.0.0.0", 3000) do |connection|
while request = connection.request
case request
when Reel::Request
puts "Client requested: #{request.method} #{request.url}"
connection.respond :ok, "hello, world"
when Reel::WebSocket
puts "Client made a WebSocket request to: #{request.url}"
request << "Hello there"
connection.close
break
end
end
end
When we read a request from the incoming connection, we'll either get back a Reel::Request object, indicating a normal HTTP connection, or a Reel::WebSocket object for WebSockets connections.
- Fork this repository on github
- Make your changes and send me a pull request
- If I like them I'll merge them
- If I've accepted a patch, feel free to ask for commit access
Copyright (c) 2012 Tony Arcieri. Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE.txt for further details.