Ruby 1.8.7 -> upgrade to 1.9.2

Question

I have my app built on Rails 3.0.9 and Ruby 1.8.7. My app works fine, but with one important negative: it's really slow.

I have been looking for possible solution for this problem and the best solution seems to be upgrade of my current Ruby version to the latest one - 1.9.2.

I have never done that, so I would like to ask you - if I upgrade Ruby to the version 1.9.2, will my current app based on ruby 1.8.7 work without any problems? And what's the best way to upgrade on macOS? (I have read RVM - is the best.)

And finally my last question - I tried to deploy my app to server, but there I have the same problem - on the server (Site5), the Ruby version is 1.8.7 - and I've been told that they support only Ruby 1.8.7.

How can I solve this situation?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You're stalling. You clearly know the answers to most of your questions, you're just shaky on whether or not you're right in your assumptions.

Yes 1.9.2 is faster. Yes you probably want to use RVM (though rbenv is gaining popularity too). You probably won't have many issues with your code updating to 1.9.2, but some libraries (e.g. rubydebug) are 1.8 specific.

I would recommend you don't stick with Site5. Either run your own (cloud?) server or (and I prefer this route) go with Heroku and focus on building your app, not managing a server.

Answer 2

Yes, it's better to use RVM or RBENV to handle multiple rubies. Of course, depend to your project, you could meet some errors/deprecations, but it's rather simple to solve them.

And, if your hoster has only 1.8.7 - that's sad, you must use 1.8.7 or switch to another one (hoster).