title: Is 100 or less requests per second (for non-cached pages) what one can expect with Rails?
body: <p><strong>Preface:  Please don't start a discussion on premature optimization, or anything related.  I'm just trying to understand what kind of performance I can get from a single server with rails.</strong></p>
  
  <p>I have been benchmarking ruby on rails 3 and it seems the highest rate of requests per second I can get is around 100 requests per second.</p>
  
  <p>I used phusion passenger with nginx, and Ruby 1.8.7.</p>
  
  <p>This is on a ec2 m1.large instance:</p>
  
  <pre><code>7.5 GB memory
  4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each)
  850 GB instance storage
  64-bit platform
  I/O Performance: High
  API name: m1.large
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The page was a very simple action that wrote a single row into mysql.</p>
  
  <pre><code>user = User.new
  user.name = "test"
  user.save
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I am assuming no caching (memcache, etc), I just want to get a feel for the raw numbers.</p>
  
  <p>I used apache bench on the same ec2 instance, and I used varying levels of # of requests (from 1000 to 10000 and varying numbers of concurrent requests 1/5/10/25/50/100).</p>