Passenger Phusion
Scott Willson
A note for you technical folks: I tried running the ATRA, ABA, and
OBRA sites on Passenger last night. It worked so poorly that I had to
fall back on Mongrel.
I was surprised. I've run nginx + Passenger on FreeBSD for the staging
environment and another small Rails app, and it works great. In fact,
it did work well for the lower-traffic ATRA and ABA sites.
However, things went south with the higher-traffic OBRA site. Load
went up to 15 and we used up all of our 5GB of RAM! Page response
times were slow. After Passenger caught up and traffic died down,
Passenger did do a better job than Mongrel of releasing memory. It
also was easier to restart cleanly, but those are the only advantages
I saw.
In addition, we do a lot of page caching of results pages. Passenger
would see the cached page files sometimes, but not other times! This
was a killer, because our results page rendering is slow.
So, Passenger seems just dandy for sites with traffic below 1 dynamic
requests/second, but far worse than Mongrel for busier sites.
"Why?" is an interesting question. I'd like to fire up a test server
and do some proper performance tests and get an answer. I'm sure you
can think of different things to explore.
Scott