It turns out that working with Ruby gets you a lot of things for free.
I’ve previously created and deployed high-availability Sinatra applications before, and took for granted that it just worked.
I had reason to deploy a solution in Bottle recently, and I thought it would just work the same. HAHAHAHA nope.
I was trying to get the application working behind an autoscaling group. It worked fine if I forwarded the port to my local box, but it wasn’t working when I hit the load balancer. It looked it like wasn’t handling anything more than the ELB health checks. After a few hours of trying to work out where the bottleneck[0] was, turns out that Bottle doesn’t do threading.
What I was taking for granted was the Rack and WEBrick middleware that was just handling things for me behind my 10 lines of Sinatra. Bottle doesn’t have that capability out of the box.
To get multi-threading in Bottle, you should use something like Paste. After running pip install paste, it’s as simple as changing:
bottle.run(app, host="0.0.0.0")
to
bottle.run(app, host="0.0.0.0", server='paste')
And tada! Multi-threading!
I also learnt about Siege which you can install via a package manager (in my case, brew), and point it at your local site and see how it handles threading. For the bottle app, siege crashed it out. For bottle+paste, it happily was able to serve 98% of requests, which is good enough for me.
[0] teehee