Hi Kevin:

On Jul 13, 2006, at 3:27 PM, Kevin Williams wrote:

I'm curious what this means for mongrel_cluster. They appear to
overlap in features quite a bit. I don't think the spawner uses a
config, so that's one difference. Will they be different enough?

Great question. To be honest, spawner will be fine for many people. 

Here are the main differences:

1. With spawner you can specify starting port, environment, and number of mongrels. That's it. If you need control over any of Mongrel's other billion start options, then you'll need mongrel_cluster. Of the options that don't overlap with fcgi options,  "address", "script", "chdir" and "user" are really handy.

2. mongrel_cluster provides an init.d script  for start on boot and the ability to start/stop/restart all applications with mongrel_cluster_ctl.  Roll your own with spawner.

3. mongrel_cluster provides Capistrano tasks for configuring your cluster and supporting #2 above. Roll your own with spawner (example in Cap manual).

4. mongrel_cluster views itself as one part of an entire application stack and thus tries to "blend in". It defaults to storing configuration files in '/etc' , using an init.d script, and providing control over the all the clusters on the server.  It leans towards the "unix way" rather than the "rails way".

5. mongrel_cluster was born out of the need to easily configure and manage multiple rails applications on on a single server. 

These differences reflect the different needs of the authors. The extras that mongrel_cluster provides are not mandatory for using Mongrel in clustered way, but are useful in many deployments. For myself and most of my customers, mongrel_cluster  won't be obsolete, because it does work for us that we would have to do ourselves if we switched spawner. 

Thanks,
Bradley Taylor

------
Rails Optimized Hosting ~ VPS and Dedicated Servers
Simplified Deployment  ~ Services and Software






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