Here are some numbers from our application, let me know if this helps:
We have 400K daily active users, doing 200 requests a second and around 10MM page views per day. All requests are dynamic and hit the full Rails stack. We're probably easily in the top 5 Rails sites on the net based on load.
We run all of this on 5x 4core 8GB application servers and 2x 4core 32GB db servers in master-master replication. We run 16 mongrels on each app server for a total of 80. Our average response time per request is around 100-200ms.
We host on Softlayer and pay around $6000 a month.
Also, the number of mongrels you will need is directly dependent on how fast your requests are, and how you are loading balancing across these mongrels. We use the nginx proxy with the fair load balancing patch.
http://brainspl.at/articles/2007/11/09/a-fair-proxy-balancer...
Thank you sir - this kind of info is pure gold. Softlayer - do they manage the servers or is that your datacenter and you manage the machines yourselves? Was looking at Engine Yard - they start at $17k for a cluster.
Yeah we looked at EngineYard. They are good if you don't ever want to deal with deployment at all, but I really can't justify the premium. The 17K price quoted is probably for their basic cluster of 3 machines - we run on 10 now so it's probably going to be a lot more than that.
SoftLayer is unmanaged, but they do have staff that can help you with sysadmin stuff for a fee.
We have 400K daily active users, doing 200 requests a second and around 10MM page views per day. All requests are dynamic and hit the full Rails stack. We're probably easily in the top 5 Rails sites on the net based on load.
We run all of this on 5x 4core 8GB application servers and 2x 4core 32GB db servers in master-master replication. We run 16 mongrels on each app server for a total of 80. Our average response time per request is around 100-200ms.
We host on Softlayer and pay around $6000 a month.
Also, the number of mongrels you will need is directly dependent on how fast your requests are, and how you are loading balancing across these mongrels. We use the nginx proxy with the fair load balancing patch. http://brainspl.at/articles/2007/11/09/a-fair-proxy-balancer...