Jetty, JRuby 1.3.0RC1 and Warbler
We’ve been preparing a new product for launch over the last few weeks, and part of the process has been testing out using Jetty and JRuby for the live deployment instead of our trusty Mongrel and MRI deployments.
We’ve been using the very handy Warbler gem (http://github.com/nicksieger/warbler) to package up our Rails app ready for Jetty, and it’s been going swimmingly. However, after a recent upgrade we’ve seen some very painful memory problems, with the Jetty process adding 100b to the heap with every request. We finally tracked the errors down do a part of our code doing a lot of XML processing in the Hpricot jruby gem. It turns out that Warbler bundles JRuby 1.3.0 RC1, and this was having difficulty with Hpricot.
And this is where Github saves the day again! Downloading a more recent fork of the warbler gem with JRuby 1.3.1 has solved our pain (the gem is at http://github.com/finnlabs/warbler) and our test deployment server is now zipping along nicely again.
