Rails 2.3 with Ruby 1.9

After the longest time we decided to upgrade the rails version in our applications. The last upgrade was to 1.2.6 year and a half ago. As we have quite a number of applications I am quite reluctant to upgrade unless it's really really worth it. There was quite a number of positive changes in Rails 2.2 (like the database connection pooling, thread safety and built in internationalization) but it wasn't compatible with Ruby 1.9 and I really didn't feel like going through all the apps just to go through them again to upgrade it to Ruby 1.9.

After release of Rails 2.3 compatible with Ruby 1.9 I could finally go ahead with the upgrade. And it turned out to be quite easy - but unfortunately some things haven't been ported to 1.9 yet. One of the main advantages of 1.9 is supposed to be increase in performance. It can be easily demonstrated by running recursive Fibonacci test. Unfortunately not even one 

of my applications needs faster Fibonacci :-). Having run most of our apps on 1.9 for around 2 weeks now I don't really see any tremendous performance increase or lower memory requirements. Several of our systems require extensive calculations (especially bigger accounting systems) but the performance there is dependent on many other factors like database speed, array sorting and grouping and so on and I am still working out the optimizations here.

What really really really helped me during the migration was David Black's book The Well-Grounded Rubyist. I heard him speaking several times but I was quite surprised by how well written the book was. It's really sharp

 and to the point without useless 'technicalities'. At the same time it's very readable and not dry like API reference.

Okay back to Rails. As I said most of the things went smooth BUT here's the list of some that didn't :-)

1) Mongrel doesn't work - not so much of a problem for me as I don't use it in production and in development I switched to Thin. 

2) File upload on nginx doesn't work - it seems to be an issue with Rack that is bundled with Rails 2.3. This is a bit of an issue as I was just starting to like nginx and I used it for some my lighter applications. 

3) Problems with encoding - this a single issue that I didn't manage to resolve or find a workaround. We've done some projects in Europe and they have to support slavic languages with all their funny characters. As 1.9 supports so many encodings I really didn't expect any problems there but I didn't manage to get pass the

incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT

when data from database contain special characters. There are several patches available in lighthouse here and here but non of them really worked for me - safe for

contact.name.force_enconding('utf-8')

4) send_data doesn't work on binary files with message

invalid byte sequence in UTF-8

. I used to use it for on the fly generated images but had to replace it with creating a temp file and then use

send_file

5) ruby zip hasn't been updated yet and still references ftools that have been replaced by fileutils. I had to change it manually along with File.move reference replaced with FileUtils.move

6) quite a number of plugins stopped working and as many are no longer supported I decided to ditch a few of them. I have never been a fan of the small rails plugins that only adding some syntactic sugar not just because they break on every update of Rails (even worse with Ruby upgrade) but mostly because of their obtrusiveness. Even though they make the code shorter it's usually much less readable as you have to learn and understand the plugin.

File Downloads in Rails on Apache

Over the past half a year we worked on several systems for logistics/courier/delivery companies. It was quite fun as a big logistics and inventory control system was my very first project when I arrived to Asia 9 years ago. Last week we launched one of them. It was slightly different as most of our systems are used mainly internally but this one is also used by clients of the courier company to book deliveries. Each delivery requires printing of confirmation documents, internal routing documents, then signed and stamped documents are uploaded back to the system as a proof of delivery for clients. It has quite a number of other (technically) interesting features like integration with google maps to geo-tag the orders and notifying drivers in the area - I'll write about it soon.

As this courier company handles several hundreds of deliveries every day it requires quite a number of uploads/downloads of documents and images. The issue with uploads and downloads is that they will tie up rails processes for much longer than usual requests. The problem is that rails processes are quite expensive in terms of memory (around 70 - 100MB for simple operations). Do 20 concurrent uploads/downloads and all your rails processes and memory will get tied up - and quite wastefully as there is no 'dynamic' processing during upload or download. The process just sits there and waits for the file to get delivered. Luckily there's a simple way how to move this burden to Apache. This kind of upload/download processes will take only around 2MB on average and your rails processes are free to handle the dynamic requests.

To let apache handle file downloads use x_sendfile. All you need to do is install x_senfile module on apache and adjust you config a little. Here's the installation instructions for Ubuntu 8.04:

cd /usr/local/src
wget http://tn123.ath.cx/mod_xsendfile/mod_xsendfile.c
apxs2 -cia mod_xsendfile.c

Open apache config file and add the module line:

sudo vim /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

LoadModule xsendfile_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_xsendfile.so

Add the following 2 lines to your virtual host file

sudo vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/my_app

XSendfile on
XSendFileAllowAbove on

You will have to restart the apache and you should be done:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now in your controller handling download add x_sendfile attribute and set it to true

 send_file("/home/test/big_file.zip",
           :filename => "big_file.zip",
           :type => "application/zip,
           :x_sendfile=> true)

The uploads are equally easy. You just need to apache modules libapreq2 and modporter.

wget http://mirror.nus.edu.sg/apache/httpd/libapreq/libapreq2-2.12.tar.gz
tar -xzf libapreq2-2.12.tar.gz
cd libapreq2-2.12
./configure --with-apache2-apxs=/usr/bin/apxs2
make
sudo make install

Now download and install modporter. Get it from the github. Either use the download link and unzip or just clone the repository

git clone git://github.com/actionrails/modporter.git
cd modporter

On Ubuntu I had to change reference to apxs in Rakefile as the in ubuntu it's apxs2.

vim Rakefile

Change the APXS line to the following:

APXS           = "apxs2"

No just run rake:

sudo rake

add the following to your apache2.conf

sudo vim /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

LoadModule apreq_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_apreq2.so
LoadModule porter_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_porter.so

To actually use it in your rails application you will need modporter plugin.

script/plugin install git://github.com/actionrails/modporter-plugin.git

Add the following to the application_controller.rb (application.rb before Rails 2.3)

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base 
mod_porter_secret = "secret"
.
.

and just enable porter in you vhost file:

sudo vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/my_app

Porter On
PorterSharedSecret secret

And that's all now if you check the uploaded files they will be a ModPorter::UploadedFile Credit for this goes to Koz from theRailsWay.com - you can find more information here.