Phusion Passenger 2.0.5 now compatible with Edge Rails
Posted by David December 05, 2008 @ 01:20 PM
The Phusion team keeps blazing ahead with Passenger and improving it rapidly. They’ve just released version 2.0.5, which includes a few fixes and introduces compatibility with the Rack-based Edge Rails.
At 37signals, we’ve already switched over Ta-da List and are busy working on getting the rest of our suite running on Passenger. It’s just so much easier to deal with and the memory savings you get through REE are a nice cherry on top.
I keep getting a steady stream of success reports from all over the world as well. I’ve even read of a few people getting back into Rails development because Passenger finally took out the inconvenience of deploying.
It’s hard to argue with the usability. I’ve personally been setting up a new server running Ubuntu 8.10 and using Apache 2 with Passenger. The time it took me to go from a fresh install to a complete production setup was ridiculously low. There’s just so much less to worry about.
If you haven’t given Passenger a chance yet, now is definitely the time.
This is so true. We’ve recently started using Passenger for non mission critical stuff (blogs, forums etc), and are seriously considering migrating everything else soon.
True !
I’ve been using Passenger on my various development setups since the release of 2.0.3 and I’m very happy with it.
I’m also seriously considering moving my production stack to it and keep the great Nginx on a custom port for the static files.
Kudos to all of you !
We’ve also switched over to Passenger as our target platform instead of our previous nginx/Mongrel setup.
A friend from Trabian was showing me some of the memory savings and how well it was running in production and I came in on Monday and began the change over. It goes up so smooth and I believe our admins are quite happy to be using it.
I have several apps deployed in my production environment. With passenger, all apps are able to share the rails processes resource. Above all, it’s really easy to complete the work and add a new app to the environment. If they were deployed with mongrel/thin, I have to seperate the resource and monit them and there would be too much things to config.
Just deployed my new marley-based blog (a Sinatra app) using passenger – piece of cake.
We wanted to see how much better Passenger performs than our mongrels behind nginx, so I switched over our staging environment to it:
1) god stop mongrels; 2) stop nginx; 3) install apache2; 4) install passenger gem; 5) configure apache to load passenger module and to know where the application is; 6) reload apache. Done.
I then benchmarked the slowest page of our app using the concurrency level of 50 and got a stable 60 reqs/sec. Memory usage was half of what Mongrels would use, and we’re not even running Enterprise Ruby.
A win.
Its kinda hard to believe that you could get rails 2.2 up and running on Ubuntu quickly. Ubuntu and gem hate each other; and its even worse than normal right now because the rubygems package on Ubuntu is too old to install rails 2.2.
You can get it working, of course, but its a lot of headache at the moment.
Mike, I JUST setup Ubuntu with Rubygems and Passenger. The only thing I had to do was install Rubygems by hand instead of using apt-get for it. Problem solved ;)
In regards to what Mislav said, I have seen similar thing happen with Thin. I have watched Thin daemons continue to leak memory until monit restarts them. Passenger’s memory footprint fluctuates within a 10Mb range and uses considerably less memory than Thin did running the same application. Passenger is a big win for us.
Phusion Passenger is not just for small pet projects. We built the website for a well-known national fast food restaurant in the U.S. who gets around 100K pageviews a day.
It uses Apache 2 with Passenger 2.0.3 and it performs extremely well. Relatively low memory consumption and and the best thing is that you hardly have to mess around with it. It just runs.
I’d say replace your fancy Mongrels and use Passenger.
Ubuntu 8.10 can be a pain because it defaults to ruby 1.8.7
I can recommend not even installing ruby from from apt at all. I just installed REE, passenger and rubygems “by hand” (which isn’t anything more than running an standard install script)
Zed who?
Its just curious to see DHH talking about Ubuntu. Sure, its fairly easy to set up Rails and Passenger on Ubuntu, as long as you don’t actually use the debian/ubuntu tools to do so.
The version of rails in Ubuntu 8.10 is still 2.0. And rubygems is too old. And there isn’t a passenger package, unless you add http://apt.brightbox.net to sources.list. Which isn’t a big deal, but that’s just for 8.04 Hardy. And it requires that you install rubygems, which is out of date.
If I install gems manually, it might cause problems with other Ruby packages installed on my machine. I installed the latest version of course, because its required. And it did break things that still had “require_gem” in the source instead of “gem”. This is fail.
So why make a post that trumpets the ease of installation on Ubuntu 8.10, when in reality Rails isn’t even available via the regular Ubuntu tools? This might not seem like a big deal, but it does matter for a lot of IT shops.
I use rails and ruby all the time. We use Solaris at work, and I run linux at home and on some of our development boxes. I really appreciate the work put into Rails.
But when I see some new program or technology or whatever and it looks interesting, I always try to apt-get install it. If its not there, then 9 times out of 10 it means that tool is small time and isn’t worth the effort.
@Mike: The Rails core team has no control over what Debian or Ubuntu puts in their repositories. Over the years I’ve learned to ignore the Rails/RubyGems packages in apt and to use the upstream versions instead. Everything works smoothly if I do that.