Rails - Nov 2006 - Case studies for high-availability Rails deployments?

Hello everyone,

We are developing a new version of a satellite telemetry distribution
system currently in use in the European space industry, and are trying
to convince the client to permit us to use Rails as the platform for
the higher-level layers of the system.

The system as a whole has strict high-availability requirements (our
current track record is over six nines yearly), and in order to push
for Rails adoption we need to demonstrate that Rails, and the
technology stack it runs on, would be capable of meeting these
requirements.

So, I''m in the process of putting together a comprehensive argument
for Rails, and am wondering whether anyone on the list would know of
case studies or references of Rails being successfully deployed in
strict high-availability situations? (Googling didn''t turn up any, and
skimming through the real-world usage references on the Wiki did not
immediately provide useful leads.)

Also, I would appreciate hearing any thoughts and experience on how
the various Rails stacks (FastCGI, SCGI, Mongrel, etc) measure up both
reliability-wise and in situations where there would be a high number
of concurrent, long-lived server push ("Comet") connections open. Are
there any known memory leaks, for instance, that should be taken into
consideration (I seem to recall that at least the FCGI gem has
previously suffered from leaks)?

I will, naturally, summarize my findings in the form of a blog post or
two, for the benefit of the community-at-large.

--
Arto Bendiken | http://www.makalumedia.com/ | http://bendiken.net/