It happened yesterday, but it seems so long ago already… well not really. But one of my new projects went live yesterday. They grow up so fast!

This one is called Radio 1 and this happens to be the biggest Dutch public radio station for news and sports. And big they are, their reach is gigantic. Car drivers sick of commercial muzak radio will often tune in. Their website is no walk in the park either; at least the server cluster means business.

It’s hosted with all the other public TV/radio sites, but this one is the very first Ruby on Rails installation.

Deployment went relatively painless with one week delay, which was due to all the news feeds that needed to be plugged in. Some feeds use RSS, most use a custom XML format and some even needed to be placed on disk because of the strict security measures (this is the Electronic Programme Guide feed; they sure are careful with that one!).

But all went well and it’s been smooth sailing these last couple of days.

The cluster is performing OK with 30 requests per second per Mongrel. I believe they have 8 Mongrels running so should be good. And this is even before any caching! I plan to cache a few fragments and maybe the index page as a whole, but we’ll see. So far no trouble handling the load (which, due to the Tour de France, is quite high).

I am working on other Rails projects for them as well, time will tell boys…