Mongrel is an open-source software HTTP library and web server written in Ruby by Zed Shaw. It is used to run Ruby web applications and presents a standard HTTP interface. This makes layering other servers in front of it possible using a web proxy, a load balancer, or a combination of both, instead of having to use more conventional methods employed to run scripts such as FastCGI or SCGI to communicate. This is made possible by integrating a cust...
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Mongrel is an open-source software HTTP library and web server written in Ruby by Zed Shaw. It is used to run Ruby web applications and presents a standard HTTP interface. This makes layering other servers in front of it possible using a web proxy, a load balancer, or a combination of both, instead of having to use more conventional methods employed to run scripts such as FastCGI or SCGI to communicate. This is made possible by integrating a custom high-performance HTTP request parser implemented using Ragel.
Mongrel was the first web server used by Twitter, and inspired Node.js according to Ryan Dahl
Shaw subsequently created Mongrel2, an open-source "language agnostic" web server and the successor to Mongrel server.
One popular configuration is to run Apache HTTP Server 2.2 as a load balancer using mod_proxy_balancer in conjunction with several Mongrel instances, with each Mongrel instance running on a separate TCP port. This can be configured easily using the mongrel_cluster...
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