Phusion’s mod_rails Stumbles on Railsplayground
Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) is a new deployment option that should be a dream come true for hosting providers using shared hosting, or just anyone looking for an easy Rails deployment behind Apache. Performance benchmarks for the project seemed promising (a bit better than mongrel). However, when I asked to launch an application at Railsplayground (who’s home site, at the time of writing, totes “Passenger / mod_rails (Beta)” as one of their key features) I was informed that their trial run with mod_rails had ended because of stability issues. Also I was informed that testing of mod_rails performance did not show gains over fast_cgi :( In any event I was told that the company would be willing to try mod_rails in the future if it becomes more stable.
Also I found a post from a Railshosting employee saying that the total memory footprint was much larger than an app running with Mongrel. Still the sheer simplicity of using mod_rails over Mongrel could win people over as the code matures. This blog post mentions the “awesomeness” of mod_rails in terms of deployment. However the post also says that FastCGI is for “l77t hax0rs” which is a whole new kind of ’leet.
June 27 Update:
It looks like Railsplayground made mod_rails available to their users once again. See my post on the topic here.