Re: Reserved workers not as webservers

[Eric Wong <e@80x24.org>]

Devin Ben-Hur <dbenhur@whitepages.com> wrote:
> Excellent points Michael.  But to Bráulio's original request, it
> would be lovely to factor out the clean and robust process
> management parts of unicorn (daemonization, pidfile-mgmt, pre-load,
> fork, reap, signaling) separate from the HTTP/Rack server.

I think some projects exist nowadays (and were inspired by unicorn).
I also cannot speak to the quality of them, though.

My take is that stuff ends up being fairly specific to the type of
app used and putting an abstraction around them makes it harder to learn
and use than the lower-level primitives Ruby provides.

The ordering of some things (e.g. writing pid file, preload, binding
sockets, hooks, timeout checks) seems subject to the needs of the
specific server; and it's easier to figure out the ordering of those
things when the lower-level parts are right in front of you instead of
abstracted away in a library.

Having Ruby as an abstraction around C syscalls is great since I don't
have to worry about things like buffer overruns or error-checking every
single syscall.  More abstraction than that ends up hiding too many
important details, making programming and maintenance harder.