An Honest Opinion on JRuby?

[elricstorm]

So, here's my current situation.

I run a production site that is pretty much locked down for the remainder of the football season. After the season is over, I was thinking of possibly making the jump to JRuby. Before I do that, I need some honest feedback:

Question 1:

Will it be very difficult to go from Ruby 1.8.6 and Rails 2.3.3 to the latest version of JRuby? Or, is there a place to test code or debug code before making the jump?

Question 2:

My site is built around web parsing, statistics and calculations, and incorporates a lot of math core principles. Are any of these areas affected?

Question 3:

Currently, I'm hoping to pull between 5 - 20k users in for the season with subscriptions. If the latter number is true, I will more than likely push towards a multi-tiered setup where I have my content on one server, and my database on another. Does Jruby and Glassfish work well with this type of setup?

Lastly, my current setup is:

Ruby 1.8.6, Rails 2.3.3, Linux Ubuntu Hardy (production server), Apache, Passenger, Capistrano with deploy from Github...

Any other possible issues I will run into?

[Nick Sieger]

On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 4:51 PM, elricstorm<address-removed> wrote:

[elricstorm]

So, I got an email asking what the site was and I forgot to post a link to it so that anyone can view it and provide feedback to my earlier question. It helps to see something that is already in production when making the evaluation.

My apologies for not posting the link previously:

http://ncaastatpages.com

[Brandon Hauff]

Hi,

JRuby with the glassfish gem have worked out great for us. The
trickiest parts are setting up activerecord-jdbc-adapter (if you get
errors you may need to use 0.9.0 instead of the 0.9.1), and dancing
around a few gems that aren't compatible. We have had great
performance, especially with true multi-threading.

I would imagine you wouldn't have to change hardly any code, just
configuration.

-Brandon