Best practices for new Rails deployments on Linux?

Question

I\'ve used straight Mongrel, I\'ve used Mongrel clusters behind Apache, I\'ve looked at Thin, and I\'m becoming very intrigued by Passenger. I\'ve looked at Nginx, too. I\'ve lo

Answer 1

This morning, DHH talks about this very topic on his own blog:

But somehow the message of Passenger has been a little slow to sink in. There's already a ton of big sites running off it. Including Shopify, MTV, Geni, Yammer, and we'll be moving over first Ta-da List shortly, then hopefully the rest of the 37signals suite quickly thereafter.

So while there are still reasons to run your own custom multi-tier setup of manually configured pieces, just like there are people shying away from mod_php for their particulars, I think we've finally settled on a default answer. Something that doesn't require you to really think about the first deployment of your Rails application. Something that just works out of the box. Even if that box is a shared host!

http://www.loudthinking.com/posts/30-myth-1-rails-is-hard-to-deploy

Tobias Lütke on the topic of switching Shopify (million requests/day) to Passenger:

All this means that the total amount of memory that is used by Shopify during normal operations went from average of 9GB to an average of 5GB. We evenly distributed the savings amongst more Shopify processes and more memcached space which moved our average response time from 210ms to 130ms while traffic grew 30% in the last few months.

In conclusion: I cannot see any reason to choose a different deployment strategy at this point. Its simple, complete, fast and well documented.

http://blog.leetsoft.com/2008/11/15/passenger