Phusion Passenger thoughts?

rubyonrails-talk
1

I know there was another discussion about this, but it was a bit old and now that it has been out for a little while...what do people think about Passenger?

I've been using it a little bit at work in a very non-intensive setting and I like it - mostly for the ease of deployment. Doesn't seem to preform as well as the standard Apache + Mongrel setup in my very non-scientific opinion.

Has anyone used it in a production setting and how does it preform for you? Also - did you use their "Enterprise Edition" of Ruby?

John

2

I just tried it out yesterday. It was ridiculously simple when using the gem version, (.deb package didn’t work so well). The only problem I had was that apache worker was required to run it and I need apache prefork to run on that same box for my cms, so I had to go back to a thin cluster. It seemed pretty fast using ruby EE and took significantly less memory than thin + apache proxy.

3

to me, it's completely amazing! I have a ps on dreamhost and mod_rails completely changed the performances of the applications.. I've recently deployed speakcorp.com to a dedicated server (!) on hostgator and m_r was easy and quick to install.. overall great!

4

Hi guys, I'm a Phusion Passenger developer.

I'm not sure where you got the idea that it requires the worker MPM. Phusion Passenger officially supports both the worker *and* the prefork MPM. In fact, most people use the prefork MPM, including myself (on my development machine, at least).

5

There are a bunch of benchmarks, including independent ones, which show that Phusion Passenger is faster than Apache + Mongrel. See http://www.modrails.com/documentation.html, "How's performance?"

There are also benchmarks for Ruby Enterprise Edition which shows that Phusion Passenger + Ruby Enterprise Edition can be faster than Thin behind Nginx: Performance and memory usage comparisons — Ruby Enterprise Edition The benchmark results are completely open and public, so anybody can verify our claims.

The only gotcha is that Phusion Passenger starts your application *after* Apache has started, not before Apache has started (as is the case with Mongrel). This means that the first request will be a bit slower. If you counted the startup time of the first request, then your benchmark results will not be correct.

wiki.rubyonrails.org has been running on Phusion Passenger and Ruby Enterprise Edition for a while now, and it's been great so far.

6

I swear by it. I use is on personal production environments and all projects at work.

I use ruby enterprise edition too.

Two main reasons of using it is ease of use and I can run my wordpress (php) blogs along side. Configuring other servers with other runners etc is just too much of a waste of time and a headache. Apahche + mod_rails is the fastest and easiest way to deploy rails apps, in a flexable and pleasureble manner.

Regards

Andrew

7

I also have use it on my development machine as well as in production. Easy to configure, easy to deploy, responsive. I would recommend people use it as their default method of deployment from now on. The fact that it also supports all Rack-based frameworks as well means even my merb applications can be run on it. Thanks Hongli for the incredible free open-source product.

8

I also have use it on my development machine as well as in production.

I think that I will be moving towards it for all future development also. When I have some spare time, I think that I'll setup a machine and run some tests.

But yes, many thanks to the Phusion guys, it is a pretty great product.

9

Thanks for your reply. I can’t remember the exact sequence of events, but I think that when I installed the .deb package it switched me to worker (and gave me an error when I tried to load the module with prefork). I’m guessing that when I finally installed the gem version, I must have built it against the worker headers, since that’s what I had set up from the deb package. That’s probably why it didn’t load on the second shot. I will give it another try.

Anyway, I guess it didn’t shine through my first post, but I really do appreciate passenger and ruby ee and I was pretty bummed when I thought it wouldn’t work with my config. Passenger is a huge leap toward rails being included as standard equipment on shared hosting plans.