This is the fifth in a series of articles of me writing up my notes from from RailsConf Europe 2006. They are all first drafts, probably technically inaccurate and slanderously misquoting people. Let me know and I’ll fix them. You can follow this series of posts by looking at articles in the RailsConfEurope category.

Rails is a small part of the whole stack. A really small part. One of Jason’s slides talked about all the daemons and services required for their connector application. The list went to about 30 items. The rails application was in at number 21.

Joyent has an opinionated view of hardware: they only use one type of each thing. One type of console server, one type of disk subsystem, one type of network switch, even down to only using one type of power plug.

Their load-balanced web setup is a redundant pair of F5 6400 hardware load balancers with a RAM cache, talking directly to mongrel_rails instances.

Jason then went on to talk about how fantastic Solaris 11 is, including its support for zones & containers (virtualisation, which he considers to be absolutely essential for scalable, efficient use of hardware), dtrace and ZFS. I didn’t write any notes on these bits because it was nothing new to me, but I think I am now also a Joyent Fanboy, mostly because their opinion of Solaris matches mine. Look out for Joyent releasing their work on dtrace for ruby soon.