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

We've been using the old standard nginx -> mongrel stack for the last 18 months, and although it was not trivial to set up the first time around, it's proven flexible, and has dealt with some very high traffic sites for us. Nginx in particular has been absolutely rock solid and fast, and if you can get your app page-caching you can deal with a lot of requests.

Stuck mongrels have been an issue, so we use monit to kill them when they misbehave. Again, it was not totally trivial to set up, but we've used the same process on many many sites at this point.

We haven't played with passenger yet, so perhaps it's easier and more stable, I'll defer to the other responders on that one, all I can say is that there's no reason at all you can't build a solid stack with nginx and mongrel.