ngx_mruby

ngx_mruby - A Fast and Memory-Efficient Web Server Extension Mechanism Using Scripting Language mruby for nginx.

As the increase of large-scale and complex Web services, not only the development of Web applications is required, but also the implementation of Web server extensions in many cases. Most Web server extensions are mainly implemented in the C language because of fast and memory-efficient behavior, but by writing extensions using a scripting language we can achieve better maintainability and productivity.

However, if the existing methods are primarily intended to enhance not the implementation of Web applications but the implementation of internal processing of the Web server, the problem remains in terms of speed, memory-efficiency and safety.

Therefore, we propose a fast and memory-efficient Web server extension mechanism using a scripting language. We designed an architecture where the server process creates a region in memory to save the state of the interpreter at the server process startup, and multiple scripts share this region to process the scripts quickly when new request are made.

The server process frees the global variables table, the exception flag and the byte-code which cause an increase of memory usage, in order to reduce the memory usage and extend safety by preventing interference between each script because of sharing the region. We implemented a mechanism that can extend the internal processing of nginx easily by Ruby scripts using nginx and the embeddable scripting language mruby. It's called "ngx_mruby".