To Thread or Not to Thread: An In-Depth Look at Ruby’s Execution Models

Deploying Ruby applications using threaded servers has become widely considered as standard practice in recent years. According to the 2022 Ruby on Rails community survey, in which over 2,600 members of the global Rails community responded to a series of questions regarding their experience using Rails, threaded web servers such as Puma are by far the most popular deployment target. Similarly when it comes to job processors, the thread-based Sidekiq seems to represent the majority of the deployments. In this post, I’ll explore the mechanics and reasoning behind this practice and share knowledge and advice to help you make well-informed decisions on whether or not you should utilize threads in your applications (and to that point—how many).