We're delighted to announce the first alpha release of TorqueBox 4! TorqueBox 4 has changed substantially from any previous TorqueBox release, so we'll be putting out at least one more alpha release before transitioning to beta status. Read our TorqueBox 4 blog archives for more information on the motivation behind TorqueBox 4 and the early stages of development leading up to this alpha release.

What is TorqueBox?

TorqueBox is a modular Ruby application server for JRuby that supports Rack-based web frameworks and provides Ruby interfaces to standard enterprisey services, including scheduled jobs, caching, and messaging. TorqueBox can be used as a standalone server or applications can be packaged into .war files and deployed onto the WildFly Java application server.

Highlights of changes in TorqueBox 4.0.0.alpha1

Just RubyGems

All of our release artifacts are now RubyGems, downloadable from rubygems.org and installed via Bundler or whatever mechanism you already use for other gems.

Application server optional

TorqueBox 4 can now be used just like any standard Ruby web server, without the need to run inside a Java application server. But, if you need it, TorqueBox applications can also be bundled into a .war file and deployed to the WildFly application server. This TorqueBox release has been tested with WildFly 8.2.0.Final.

Substantial improvements to web performance

TorqueBox 4's web server, powered by Undertow, has made substantial improvements in throughput and resource efficiency over TorqueBox 3. A prerelease version of TorqueBox 4's web server powers all the 'rack-jruby' tests on the TechEmpower Framework Benchmarks, placing rack-jruby near the top of the JSON and plaintext tests it participates in.

We'll delve a bit deeper into performance below for anyone interested.

Executable JAR file support

TorqueBox applications can now be packaged up into executable .jar files and run on any machine that has Java installed on it. Read our Executable Jar Guide for more information.

Getting started with TorqueBox 4

The best resource for getting started with TorqueBox 4, including attempting to migrate applications from TorqueBox 3, is our documentation. This is an alpha and some of the documentation is still incomplete, but the various guides as well as API docs should help you get started.

TorqueBox 4 Documentation

Web performance compared to other Ruby servers

In our testing, TorqueBox 4 is the highest performing JRuby web server available. This means we may also be the overall highest performing Ruby web server (MRI or JRuby) for many applications, but each application is different. We'll provide a complete updated set of benchmarks for TorqueBox 4 against other servers as time permits and encourage members of the community to do their own testing. Accurate benchmarking takes a large amount of time and effort, but we hope to find time to do more of it.

With that said, there's been a lot of buzz generated lately about the performance of a new version of Phusion Passenger, codenamed Raptor. It claims to be "up to 4x faster than other Ruby app servers", but the devil is in the details. After some investigation, we've determined that Raptor is caching responses on the "hello world" benchmark application, bypassing the Ruby layer entirely for most requests. All the other servers under test are going through the entire Rack stack.

The merits of "hello world" benchmarks are debatable, but they do provide some valuable insight into the maximum throughput any server can possibly achieve with the simplest of Rack applications. With turbocaching enabled, Raptor serves cached responses to the benchmark client, bypassing the Rack layer entirely, even though the Rack application never indicates that the response should be cached. This invalidates any usefulness of the benchmark except to prove that caching can improve performance, which is already well-known.

Using Phusion's own benchmarking kit, modified to test against TorqueBox 4.0.0.alpha1 instead of TorqueBox 3 and with Raptor's turbocaching disabled, I get the following results when running their hello world Rack benchmark. The relative performance of each is all that matters here - the actual requests per second numbers will be different on every machine.

We love friendly competition among other web servers and encourage everyone to continue to push the boundaries of Ruby web server performance. But, we also believe it's just as important to be open and forthcoming with what is actually being benchmarked and not make claims based on misleading configurations.

Don't be a stranger!

As always, if you have any questions about or issues with TorqueBox, please get in touch.