Ruby & PostgreSQL, citation

Thanks to one of the Greenplum folks:

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Excerpt from the Agile Rails Development book ( beta )

Mortgage processing engine (www.rapidreporting.com)

Rapid Reporting is running their identity and income verification engine on
top of a Rails system. It’s used by roughly 80% of the top 1000 mortgage
underwriters in the United States and is built to handle 2 million mortgage
application transactions per month.
During their initial tests to assert whether Rails was a usable platform
for their application, they did 3,000 requests per second on a simple test
application across their 10 machine cluster. The real application processes
somewhere around 300 requests/second on a similar setup, performing
interesting business logic. Processing mortgages means following GLBA
compliance, so audit trails are generated and permissions are checked in
many places.
The application uses PostgreSQL for the database, lighttpd on the web
server, and around 10 FastCGIs per application server sitting behind a
virtual server with IP tunneling.17 Using a director setup such as this
enables them to add and remove additional FastCGIs without restarting
the web server. That, in turn, enables the automation of the process. A
daemon monitors the load and assigns more FastCGIs from their cluster
to handle the load when it peaks.
This is a real commercial application. It may sound boring, but it might
well help determine whether you’re going to get authorized to buy your
next house.
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Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco