Snailgun

Snailgun accelerates the startup of Ruby applications which require large numbers of libraries. It does this by preparing a Ruby process with the libraries preloaded, and then forking that process whenever a new command-line Ruby interpreter is required.

When using Rails or Merb, separate processes are started for each of the environments you are interested in (by default test,development), since each may be configured differently.

Example 1: standalone

# WITHOUT SNAILGUN
$ time ruby -rubygems -e 'require "active_support"' -e 'puts "".blank?'
true

real	0m2.123s
user	0m1.424s
sys 	0m0.168s

# WITH SNAILGUN
$ bin/snailgun -rubygems -ractive_support
Snailgun starting on /home/brian/.snailgun/14781 - 'exit' to end
$ time bin/fruby -e 'puts "".blank?'
true

real	0m0.064s
user	0m0.020s
sys 	0m0.004s

$ exit
logout
Snailgun ended
$ 

Example 2: inside a rails app

$ rails testapp
$ cd testapp
$ vi config/environments/test.rb
... set config.cache_classes = false
$ snailgun
Use 'exit' to terminate snailgun

# WITHOUT SNAILGUN
$ time script/runner 'puts 1+2'
3

real	0m6.417s
user	0m4.716s
sys 	0m0.680s

# WITH SNAILGUN
$ time fruby script/runner 'puts 1+2'
3

real	0m0.169s
user	0m0.040s
sys 	0m0.008s

$ time frake -T
....
real	0m0.477s
user	0m0.028s
sys 	0m0.004s

To run your test suite, use frake test. Remember to exit to terminate your preloaded processes.

Snailgun will take several seconds to be ready to process requests. Start using snailgun -v if you wish to be notified when it is ready.

By default, only 'development' and 'test' environments are loaded. You can override this, e.g.

snailgun --rails test,development,production

Choice of environment

With Rails/Merb, frake and fruby need to decide which of the preloaded environments to dispatch the command to. The safest way is to force the correct one explicitly:

RAILS_ENV=test frake test:units
RAILS_ENV=development fruby script/server
RAILS_ENV=production fruby script/server

Otherwise, a simple default heuristic is used. fruby always defaults to the 'development' environment. frake honours any RAILS_ENV=xxx setting on the command line. Otherwise, frake defaults to the 'test' environment if no args are given or if an arg containing the word 'test' is given, or else to the 'development' environment.

Bugs and limitations

Only works with Linux/BSD systems, due to use of passing open file descriptors across a socket.

Because fruby has to choose the environment to dispatch the request to before it is run, the default choice may be wrong and you may have to override it using an environment variable.

# Wrong
fruby script/server production

# Right
RAILS_ENV=production fruby script/server

fruby script/console doesn't yet give any speedup, because script/console uses exec to invoke irb. Needs a replacement script/console.

The environment is not currently passed across the socket to the ruby process. This means it's not usable as a fast CGI replacement.

In Rails, you need to beware that any changes to your config/environment* will not be reflected until you stop and restart snailgun.

Licence

This code is released under the same licence as Ruby itself.

Author

Brian Candler [email protected]