Rainbows! - Rack app server for sleepy apps and slow clients

Rainbows! is an HTTP server for sleepy Rack applications. It is based on unicorn, but designed to handle applications that expect long request/response times and/or slow clients.

If you're on GNU/Linux and overwhelmed by options in Rainbows!, consider yahns as it has fewer options and more energy-efficient during non-peak traffic and may also be configured as a single worker process.

For Rack applications not heavily bound by slow external network dependencies, consider unicorn instead as it simpler and easier to debug.

Rainbows! is about Diversity

We aim to support as many concurrency models as we can because they all suck; differently.

For network concurrency, models we currently support are:

• Coolio

• CoolioFiberSpawn

• CoolioThreadPool

• CoolioThreadSpawn

• Epoll

• EventMachine

• FiberPool

• FiberSpawn

• NeverBlock

• Revactor

• ThreadPool

• ThreadSpawn

• WriterThreadPool

• WriterThreadSpawn

• XEpoll

• XEpollThreadPool

• XEpollThreadSpawn

We have many more on the way for handling network concurrency. Additionally, we also use multiple processes (managed by Unicorn) for robustness and CPU/memory/disk concurrency.

We also provide Rainbows::AppPool Rack middleware for some network concurrency models for limiting application concurrency independently of network concurrency.

Features

• Designed for Rack, the standard for modern Ruby HTTP applications.

• Built on unicorn, inheriting its process/socket management features such as transparent upgrades and Ruby configuration DSL.

• As with Unicorn, it is able to stream large request bodies off the socket to the application while the client is still uploading. Since Rainbows! can handle slow clients, this feature is more useful than it is with Unicorn.

• Combines heavyweight concurrency (worker processes) with lightweight concurrency (Events/Fibers/Actors/Threads), allowing CPU/memory/disk to be scaled independently of client connections. More concurrency models (listed in the TODO) will be supported as we find time for them.

• We give you lots of options with more on the way.

Applications

Rainbows! is mainly designed for the odd things Unicorn sucks at:

• 3rd-party APIs (to services outside your control/LAN)

• OpenID consumers (to providers outside your control/LAN)

• Reverse proxy implementations with editing/censoring (to upstreams outside your control/LAN)

• Comet

• BOSH (with slow clients)

• HTTP server push

• Long polling

• Reverse AJAX

Rainbows! can also be used to service slow clients directly even with fast applications.

License

Rainbows! is copyright 2009,2010 by all contributors (see logs in git). Rainbows! is licensed under the Ruby (1.8) license or the GPLv2 or later. See the included LICENSE file for more details.

Rainbows! is 100% Free Software.

Install

You may install it via RubyGems on RubyGems.org:

gem install rainbows

Usage

for Rack applications

In APP_ROOT (where config.ru is located), run:

rainbows

Rainbows! will bind to all interfaces on TCP port 8080 by default.

Configuration File(s)

Rainbows! will look for the config.ru file used by rackup in APP_ROOT.

For deployments, it can use a config file for Unicorn and Rainbows!-specific options specified by the --config-file/-c command-line switch. Rainbows! accepts all options found in Unicorn::Configurator as well as the "Rainbows!" block, so you can have the following in your config file:

worker_processes 4 # assuming four CPU cores
Rainbows! do
  use :ThreadSpawn
  worker_connections 100
end

See the Rainbows! configuration documentation for more details.

Development

You can get the latest source via git from the following locations (these versions may not be stable):

https://yhbt.net/rainbows.git
https://repo.or.cz/rainbows.git (mirror)

You may browse the code from the web and download the latest snapshot tarballs here:

• yhbt.net/rainbows.git

• repo.or.cz/rainbows.git (gitweb)

Inline patches (from "git format-patch") to the mailing list are preferred because they allow code review and comments in the reply to the patch.

We will adhere to mostly the same conventions for patch submissions as git itself. See the 80x24.org/mirrors/git.git/tree/Documentation/SubmittingPatches?h=v2.20.1 document distributed with git on on patch submission guidelines to follow. Just don't email the git mailing list or maintainer with Rainbows! patches.

Disclaimer

There is NO WARRANTY whatsoever if anything goes wrong, but let us know and we'll try our best to fix it.

Rainbows! is extremely sensitive to fatal bugs in the apps it hosts. Each Rainbows! worker process may be handling thousands of clients; unexpectedly killing the process will abort all of those connections. Lives may be lost!

Rainbows! hackers are not responsible for your application/library bugs. Use an application server which is tolerant of buggy applications if you cannot be bothered to fix all your fatal bugs.

Contact

All feedback (bug reports, user/development discussion, patches, pull requests) go to the mailing list. Patches must be sent inline (git format-patch -M + git send-email). No subscription is necessary to post on the mailing list. No top posting.

• email: rainbows-public@yhbt.net

• subscribe: rainbows-public+subscribe@yhbt.net

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