Phusion Passenger thoughts?

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

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.

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!

On 8/23/08, John Y. [email protected] wrote:

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


Emanuele T.
4955 Narragansett Avenue
San Diego CA 92107

On Aug 24, 5:36 am, “Joe K” [email protected] wrote:

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.

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).

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

On Aug 23, 11:47 pm, John Y. [email protected] wrote:

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
aboutPassenger?

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.

There are a bunch of benchmarks, including independent ones, which
show that Phusion Passenger is faster than Apache + Mongrel. See
Support, “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.

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.

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.

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.