Server rigged to use Phusion Passenger

We’ve just upgraded the server to use this excellent gem, which allows Ruby on Rails applications to be served like PHP applications. Previously, updating Rails applications entails a lot administrative hassle. Managing mongrel clusters was a huge burden to deploy and monitor and we had to do it every time we wanted to deploy the latest changes to the application.

Of greater concern was its wanton consumption of memory. I brought the MediaTemple server down after running 9 mongrels concurrently and had to reboot it in order to restore the system. From what I gather, Passenger, is an Apache mod, so pages are served by Apache rather than a mongrel server daemon that runs in the background.

Apache takes care of multiple concurrent requests, and through Passenger we can define the number of instances available to serve up incoming requests. I haven’t done any real benchmarks, but overall, memory consumption is markedly lower and speeds are up due to efficient caching. Furthermore, Ruby Enterprise Edition, a fork of the Ruby runtime can also be used to decrease memory consumption, which is what we’re going to explore next.

Also, I’ve updated the Hibernate/NetBeans series with part two.