Hi Alessandro,
I imagine it''s possible from a technical standpoint. Rails runs pretty
well on Windows now (especially with Curt Hibbs'' Instant Rails
project). It should be reasonably fast, but I haven''t tested this yet.
The two issues you''d have to deal with are security and determining
your performance needs.
For security you''re on your own. I''ll say from experience
that it''s
much easier to secure a Unix system then it is to secure a windows
system. But, you might want to check out running your installation
under something like Xen or VMware which will let you at least shield
your physical box from attacks and make it easy to recover.
For performance, you''ll need a much better measurement of how your site
will need to handle requests. For example, if you are saying that
you''ll get 20k visitors/day do you mean "requests for pages"
or "people
making lots of requests". If you mean number of people then
you''re on
the wrong track. It''s damn hard to measure what people will do. You
need to come up with a metric which you can measure, my favorite being
requests/second.
Let''s take your 20k and say it''s a daily request count. Now,
I''m going
to do a simulation to come up with a number of requests/hour using my
handy tool R:
> samples <- rnorm(1:24, mean=8333, sd=1/3*8333)
> summary(samples)
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
2537 6071 8179 8080 9437 13840
Now, if we then divide this up to estimate requests/second we get:
> summary(samples)/(60*60)
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
0.7047222 1.6863889 2.2719444 2.2444444 2.6213889 3.8444444
> sd(samples)/(60*60)
[1] 0.7754746
So, as a really rough first guess you''re looking at an average max of 4
(3.8) req/sec, and a possible range of say 2-6 (1.51 - 6.17) req/sec.
Unless you plan to run this thing on your coffee maker (or you''re
running Typo) then you should have no problems. 6 req/sec is pretty
measly as far as web traffic goes.
Oh, and resist the temptation to convince yourself, "Hey, so 6 req/sec
max, but let''s assume that all 20k visitors will do 10 req/sec so I
need 60 req/sec." Sorry man, you won''t see an average user
clicking 10 times in a second unless you''re running a porn site with a
subsecond rotation policy.
Zed A. Shaw
http://www.zedshaw.com/
On Thu, 27 Oct 2005 14:03:23 -0200
"Alessandro Cauduro"
<news-/kv94B6L94ZwFqzsTH5u/w@public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Is it possible to have a Windows Machine Hosting a RoR heavy traffic
> user website (more than 20.000 unique visitors/day)?
>
>
>
> What would you recommend in this scenario?
>
>
>
> Alessandro
>
>