Grow Your Unix Beard Using Ruby
summary
Unicorn exposes production-ready Unix internals: it uses fork and exec (fork(2), execve(2)) to pre-fork workers that all share a listener socket and rely on the kernel’s accept(2) for load balancing. That design enables copy-on-write memory savings (Shopify runs ~70 workers per box), and supports zero-downtime re-exec by passing socket fds across an exec. Works well in practice but relies on a C-VM/GC that is copy-on-write friendly (REE or MRI 2.0).
AI-written summary · about
chapters (7)
related talks
36mUnicorn Unix Magic Tricks
44mThe Ruby Guide to *nix Plumbing
21mConquering Massive Traffic Spikes in Ruby Applications with Pitchfork
25mUnderstanding Ruby Web Server Internals: Puma, Falcon, and...
39mPractical Unix for Ruby & Rails
36mIntroduction to Concurrency in Ruby
42mUnix For Rubyists
27mIn-Depth Ruby Concurrency: Navigating the Ruby concurrency landscape