Comments on: ThoughtWorks Mingle

By: tfriesen

tfriesen — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 17:19:25 +0000

I also just installed Mingle as a test onto my Win XP workstation. I cannot believe the amount of resources this thing takes up. Come on … really … Mingle cannot be so complex that it needs this much!

Tim

By: Jason Meridth

Jason Meridth — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11:02:27 +0000

@Everyone

Yep. I stood up a brand new Windows 2003 VM, nothing else on it except MS updates, and the new release of Mingle was still a CPU hog.

This reminds me why I unsubscribed from the Thoughtworks RSS feed (it’s a Mingle marketing machine).

I pray they get it right, it looks great with the few pages I’ve interacted with and what I’ve been reading. But to require that much memory/CPU power is unacceptable.

By: schambers

schambers — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 10:48:43 +0000

After just reviewing the latest version myself it indeed seems like they STILL have performance problems. With myself using it and noone else, it takes a full 5 seconds to open most pages.

This is on a box with 2 gb of memory and a dual core 2.6ghz cpu with nothing else running on the box. crazy!!

By: smortensen

smortensen — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 07:36:44 +0000

Yup. Mingle bites on memory and CPU.
Even the full-blooded latest release just cranks your cpu and chews 500MB of ram.
I’m the only guy trialling it on the virtual server and i’ve only a single project with bugg3r all action on it (ie only me!)…
It’s a ruddy joke. 500MB, PLUS my DB, PLUS the webPortal. Get a grip people. Supersize my coke for free, sure, but leave my memory at standard would ya?

By: Chris Hefley

Chris Hefley — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 14:54:32 +0000

Just adding my voice to the outcry, hoping Thoughtworks will take notice. I absolutely love Mingle, and I want to use the hell out of it, but the performance issues are crippling. When I first start it up, it’s consuming about 81MB of RAM, no big deal, but after a few minutes of usage it gets up close to 500MB, and it never drops back down. I installed it on my Build Server, and now I have to reboot it regularly, primarily because of Mingle’s memory problems.

By: Sidu

Sidu — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 15:39:24 +0000

Start up time has always been an issue when you have to fire up a new JVM, but there is something called NailGun which can help and which is now part of JRuby (if I’m not mistaken).
Also, a base MRI/Rails/Mongrel instance (with no additional code) eats 60MB of memory anyway. A quick look at Mingle’s web.xml indicates that Mingle ships with with 8 JRuby runtimes/Rails instances, so it’s not surprising it hogs memory.
The next release of Mingle will ship with JRuby 1.1 (the latest Mingle, 1.1, uses JRuby 1.0) which should definitely improve performance.

By: Yan

Yan — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 00:50:02 +0000

Mingle’s crappy performance has nothing to do with RoR. It does not take 2 cpus and a gig of ram to change the status on a bug. The product design is just so great but I can’t believe they actually let themselves get away with releasing a simple database app that requires 2 gig of ram. It’s EMBARASSING thoughtworks! Embarassing, nothing less!

And to add insult to injury, they obfuscate the code with their java compiling so that the community can’t help fix these problems. Honestly I think mingle actually _gets it_ in terms of story and bug tracking (contextual views with drag and drop), but releasing it with such nasty performance and then trying to charge money for it?

Everyone please actively post to your blog about this – thoughtworks needs to be called out. Either fix it or release it as plain RoR so we can run it on mongrel. I’m willing to bet most of the performance issues are actually coming from the jruby and java container. No RoR app takes this long to start up!

By: Sean Chambers

Sean Chambers — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 00:21:48 +0000

I will come back and kick this horse again =)

I had an interesting conversation with an Apple engineer today at lunch about RoR and I brought up Mingle.

I was mainly talking about how it was a really neat project management tool and had a super cool interface but it was a HUGE hog.

We both agreed that interpeted languages will only go so far. Look at Twitter for instance. Once your traffic and/or application base gets to a certain size, where is your upgrade path? You have none. throw more memory at the problem. I think Mingle is an very good example of RoR pushed to the limits.

Anyways I shouldn’t complain anymore. I have moved my mingle server to a dedicated box with 3gb of memory and it seems to perform much better.

By: Arthur Tam

Arthur Tam — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 19:27:33 +0000

I’m experiencing the same problem where within minutes of starting up Mingle half a gig of RAM will have already been used.

I’m running Mingle on a virtual server with 1 GB RAM and it is really frustrating when Mingle eats up all the RAM and the virtual server starts to behave strangely.

I ended up creating several cron jobs to restart the Mingle process during times it’s less likely to be used. It doesn’t solve my problem but it lowers the amount of times I need to manually restart my virtual server.

By: Bil Simser

Bil Simser — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 12:52:27 +0000

I’m experience pain and suffering with Mingle. We started with v1 and updated to 1.1. Server is slow and pegged out, MySQL is falling down, website is horrendously slow once you get more than 20 stories in a project. In short, I consider Mingle a disaster and we’re looking for alternatives starting today. Planning on blogging my plight with details to come.