# Welcome to Puma 5: Spoony Bard.

Puma 5 brings new experimental performance features, a few quality-of-life features and loads of bugfixes.

## What's New

### Lower latency, better throughput

From our friends at GitLab, the new experimental `wait_for_less_busy_worker` config option may reduce latency and improve throughput for high-load Puma apps on MRI. See the [pull request](https://github.com/puma/puma/pull/2079) for more discussion.

Users of this option should see reduced request queue latency and possibly less overall latency.

Add the following to your `puma.rb` to try it:

```ruby 
wait_for_less_busy_worker
# or 
wait_for_less_busy_worker 0.001
```

Production testing at GitLab suggests values between `0.001` and `0.010` are best.

### Better memory usage

5.0 brings two new options to your config which may improve memory usage.

#### nakayoshi_fork

`nakayoshi_fork` calls GC a handful of times and compacts the heap on Ruby 2.7+ before forking. This may reduce memory usage on Pumas on MRI with preload enabled. It's inspired by [Koichi Sasada's work](https://github.com/ko1/nakayoshi_fork).

To use it, you can add this to your `puma.rb`:

```ruby 
nakayoshi_fork
```

#### fork_worker

Puma 5 introduces an experimental new cluster-mode configuration option, `fork_worker` (`--fork-worker` from the CLI). This mode causes Puma to fork additional workers from worker 0, instead of directly from the master process:

```
10000   \_ puma 4.3.3 (tcp://0.0.0.0:9292) [puma]
10001       \_ puma: cluster worker 0: 10000 [puma]
10002           \_ puma: cluster worker 1: 10000 [puma]
10003           \_ puma: cluster worker 2: 10000 [puma]
10004           \_ puma: cluster worker 3: 10000 [puma]
```

This allows the usage of `preload` with `phased_restart`. It also may improve memory usage because the worker process loads additional code after processing requests.

To learn more about using `refork` and `fork_worker`, see [the documentation](https://github.com/puma/puma/blob/master/docs/fork_worker.md).

### What else is new?

* **Loads of bugfixes**.
* Faster phased restarts and worker timeouts.
* pumactl now has a `thread-backtraces` command to print thread backtraces, bringing thread backtrace printing to all platforms, not just *BSD and Mac. (#2053)
* Added incrementing `requests_count` to `Puma.stats`. (#2106)
* Faster phased restart and worker timeout. (#2220)
* Added `state_permission` to config DSL to set state file permissions (#2238)
* Ruby 2.2 support will be dropped in Puma 6. This is the final major release series for Ruby 2.2.

## Upgrade

* If you did not explicitly set `environment` before, Puma now checks `RAILS_ENV` and will use that, if available in addition to `RACK_ENV`.
* If you have been using the `--control` CLI option, update your scripts to use `--control-url`.
* If you are using `worker_directory` in your config file, change it to `directory`.
* If you are running MRI, default thread count on Puma is now 5, not 16. This may change the amount of threads running in your threadpool. We believe 5 is a better default for most Ruby web applications on MRI. Higher settings increase latency by causing GVL contention.
* If you are using a worker count of more than 1 and you are not using phased_restart, Puma will now `preload` by default. We believe this is a better default, but may cause issues in non-Rails applications if you do not have the proper `before` and `after` fork hooks configured. See documentation for your framework. Rails users do not need to change anything.
* tcp mode and daemonization have been removed without replacement. For daemonization, please use a modern process management solution, such as systemd or monit.
* `connected_port` was renamed to `connected_ports` and now returns an Array, not an Integer.

Then, update your Gemfile:

`gem 'puma', '< 6'`