Well after upgrading my personal server to Etch I'm having fun.

I had some horrible performance problems with Ruby on Rails and libapache2-mod-fastcgi so now I'm using mongrel and mod_proxy - which is should probably write about sometime.

As an example of the problems I had :

steve@skx:~$ uptime
 21:13:18 up 23 days,  5:25,  2 users,  load average: 72.46, 29.70, 11.44

(Xen instance, 256Mb of memory, 512Mb swap, running on my xen hosting setup.)

I'm not 100% sure how to write about using Mongrel - it assumes you already have a rails application and know about it a little. Maybe just a quick overview?

Anyway I now have two rails applications running nicely enough:

• My bookmark application - written by me.
• My weblog - using Typo

(The latter of which took me a lot of time to setup.)