Sinatra::Synchrony

Sinatra + EM-Synchrony - fast, concurrent web applications with no callbacks!

Sinatra::Synchrony is a very small extension for Sinatra that dramatically improves the concurrency of your web application. Powered by EventMachine and EM-Synchrony, it increases the number of clients your application can serve per process when you have a lot of slow IO calls (like HTTP calls to external APIs). Because it uses Fibers internally to handle concurrency, no callback gymnastics are required! Just develop as if you were writing a normal Sinatra web application, use non-blocking libraries (see below) and you're all set!

How it works

Loads EventMachine and EM-Synchrony. Requires app server with EventMachine and Ruby 1.9 support (Thin, Rainbows!, Heroku).
Inserts the Rack::FiberPool middleware, which automatically provides a Fiber for each incoming request, allowing EM-Synchrony to work.
Inserts async-rack, which makes Rack's middleware more async friendly.
Adds em-http-request, which you can use with EM::Synchrony to do concurrent HTTP calls to APIs! Or if you'd rather use a different client:
Patches TCPSocket via EM-Synchrony. Any software that uses this (such as an HTTP Client that uses Net::HTTP) can run without blocking IO. RestClient works great with this!
Patches Rack::Test so that it runs your tests within an EventMachine. Just test the same way you did before and it should just work.
Patches Resolv via em-resolv-replace, enabling non-blocking DNS lookups magically, the way David Bowie would want it.

What it doesn't do (yet)

Provide non-blocking drivers for everything. Right now the focus was to deal with the biggest concurrency problem for most apps, which is API calls to external websites. You don't have to make everything non-blocking to speed up applications with this approach, which is the important thing to understand. For example, if your database access is under ten milliseconds, it's not as bad as an API call to an external web site that takes a few seconds. There are numerous non-blocking drivers available however, check out the Protocol Implementations page on the EventMachine GitHub Wiki for a full list. I would personally like to see plug-and-play drivers implemented for the major three ORMs (ActiveRecord, DataMapper, Sequel), because then I could simply drop them into this gem and you'd be non-blocking without requiring any special changes. For most of the web applications I work on, this would be all I need to eliminate my blocking IO problems forever!

Installation

Install the gem:

gem install sinatra-synchrony

require 'sinatra/synchrony'
class App < Sinatra::Base
  register Sinatra::Synchrony
end

One important thing: do not use Sinatra's internal session code. So no "enable :sessions". Instead, enable the sessions directly via the Rack::Session::Cookie middleware (there is no consequence to doing this, Sinatra does the same thing under the hood.. it just does it in the wrong load order):

class App < Sinatra::Base
  register Sinatra::Synchrony
  use Rack::Session::Cookie, :secret => 'CHANGE ME TO SOMETHING!'
end

Tests

Just write your tests as usual, my Rack::Test patch fixes the "outside of EventMachine" errors. You must be in the test environment so that Sinatra will not load Rack::FiberPool. My patch admittedly needs some work.

Benchmarks

It's pretty fast!

class App < Sinatra::Base
  register Sinatra::Synchrony
  get '/' do
    'Hello World!'
  end
end

run with rackup -s thin:

$ ab -c 50 -n 2000 http://127.0.0.1:9292/
...
Requests per second:    3102.30 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       16.117 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.322 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   0.1      0       1
Processing:     5   16   7.7     13      38
Waiting:        3   13   7.0     10      35
Total:          6   16   7.7     13      38

Let's try a simple blocking IO example to prove it works. 100 hits to google.com:

require 'rest-client'

class App < Sinatra::Base
  register Sinatra::Synchrony
  get '/' do
    # Using EventMachine::HttpRequest
    # EM::Synchrony.sync(EventMachine::HttpRequest.new('http://google.com').get).response

    # Using RestClient, which gets concurrency via patched TCPSocket, no changes required!
    RestClient.get 'http://google.com'
  end 
end

$ ab -c 100 -n 100 http://127.0.0.1:9292/
...
Time taken for tests:   1.270 seconds

For a perspective, this operation takes 33 seconds without this extension. That's 26x faster!

TODO / Thoughts

This is fairly alpha. Please test before deploying to production.
Provide better method for patching Rack::Test that's less fragile to version changes. This is a big priority and I intend to improve this. Pull requests here welcome!
Research way to run tests with Rack::FiberPool enabled.

Author

Kyle Drake

Thanks

Ilya Grigorik and PostRank for their amazing work on em-synchrony, em-http-request, and countless articles explaining this.
Mike Perham and Carbon Five. For rack-fiber_pool, em-resolv-replace, and many blog posts and presentations on this.
Konstantin Haase for async-rack and his many contributions to Sinatra.
The many Sinatra developers that liberated me from framework hell, and EventMachine developers that liberated me from blocking IO hell.

glongman/sinatra-synchrony