[Mongrel] FastCGI performing better than Mongrel - what am I doing wrong?

[Nathan Vack]

On Apr 6, 2007, at 12:00 AM, Benjamin Jackson wrote:

>> Are you running these tests cold? You probably want to throw out the
>> first bunch of requests (say, 1000) to better simulate real-world
>> running conditions.
>
> You mean disregard them in the stats? Would you mind explaining this a
> little more?

Right after you start a lot of processes, there's a bunch of  
optimization that takes place -- frequently used files are read into  
cache, database connections are set up, necessary parts of the  
operating system are paged into memory, perhaps your VM is setting  
itself up, maybe Rails is generating caches...

All of this stuff takes time, and can make requests really slow.  
Fortunately, you almost never run Rails immediately after startup  
(unless you're using rmagick or something ;-) so throwing out the  
data with that startup hit will give you a better idea of how your  
site will perform in the real world.

In your case, it looked to me like Mongrel's median times were faster  
-- your totals were longer because of a very large max time.

-Nate