

Passenger (mod_rails) released - zapnap
http://www.modrails.com/videos/passenger.mov

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rantfoil
Setting up apache proxy + mongrels, while not impossible, is also not brain-
dead easy.

Also, in virtual private server scenarios RAM may be a hot commodity
(slicehost, for instance) -- so in theory this should help you run more rails
sites with less RAM, since you won't have to spin up individual mongrel
clusters for each domain.

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DocSavage
Here's the root link to mod_rails website: <http://www.modrails.com/>

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tlrobinson
1\. What's with the rails community's obsession with naming things names
related to trains? What's wrong with "mod_rails"?

2\. "touch tmp/restart.txt" seems like an odd way to signal a restart of your
app... what's the reason behind this?

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there
for web hosting providers only giving ftp/sftp access, there's really no other
way to signal a restart than to upload another file. you have no control over
the processes and using some web-based administration too complex.

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hopeless
Just noticed that the "Passenger
blog":[http://izumi.plan99.net/blog/index.php/2008/04/11/phusion-
pa...](http://izumi.plan99.net/blog/index.php/2008/04/11/phusion-passenger-
mod_rails-public-release-heck-it%e2%80%99s-about-time/) mentions that
Dreamhost has been beta testing Passenger. If thats true, and Dreamhost rolls
it out (soon!), then Rails is going to become as ubiquitous as PHP for hobby-
coders that don't enjoy playing sysadmins. I'm probably one of them.

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petercooper
And if you want to do the same-ish thing with similarly little configuration
(indeed, less) with any framework (not just Rails) or even with a non-Ruby
language, check out SwitchPipe: <http://switchpipe.org/>

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tptacek
The answer to this is probably obvious, but, can someone sell my on _why_ I
want mod_rails? What's wrong with the tag-team app server / web server
architecture?

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DocSavage
You're probably not the target audience. It's meant to ease deployment so it's
more like PHP in a LAMP setup.

In the author's words (<http://www.modrails.com>), here are the main features:

\- Deployment is only a matter of uploading application files. No Ruby on
Rails-specific server configuration required!

\- Built on the industry standard Apache web server.

\- Allows Ruby on Rails applications to use about 33% less memory, when used
in combination with Ruby Enterprise Edition (optional).

\- Zero maintenance. No port management, server process monitoring or stale
file cleanup required. Errors are automatically recovered whenever possible.

\- Designed for performance, stability and security. Passenger should never
crash Apache even in case of crashing Rails applications.

\- Well-documented, for both system administrators and developers!

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fendale
This is great news good to see it!

What I have been wondering is what happens to the memory footprint? It says
somewhere on the site it is reduced by 33% - is that a typical reduction?

Also, if this is like mod_perl, deployment wasn't really as simple as it
seemed. The general advice on mod_perl was to proxy requests from your front
end 'static' webserver to the mod_perl one, because each apache process had to
effectively run a Perl interpreter, giving them a big memory footprint. You
don't want to use your expensive mod_perl/ruby processes to serve images etc.

I also think there are other advantages to running expensive processes behind
a proxy (I may be wrong on this one), but I think that slow clients tend to
tied up the front end process as it streams the data to them.

If you have appServer -> proxy -> slow client, the app server sends the data
to the proxy at LAN speed, freeing it to serve another request, and the proxy
ties up a process streaming the data to the client.

I am not trying to criticize, I am interested in whether they solved these
problems (if they even are problems anymore) and how.

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thomasswift
this is huge, although i think this needed to come out earlier. rails
deployment has already been generally pegged as 'hard' or a 'pain'. I have
gotten use to getting a rails app coded fast then getting ready to spend some
time deploying.

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petercooper
Do note that this is not the first attempt at this, however it looks. My own
system (I say "my" loosely, it's public domain and open source) SwitchPipe:
<http://switchpipe.org/> is already in widespread usage, but its focus is a
little different.

~~~
thomasswift
That is why i said it seems a little late. I remember stabbing my eyes out
when i first got into rails once i tried deploying stuff, back in the
fastcgi/lighttpd days.

btw, switchpipe is going to rule the world in a few months, the support for
all the other frameworks looks awesome.

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petercooper
To be fair, fastcgi wasn't /too/ bad IF you actually had it running well at
least once _g_ and that varied incredibly from machine to machine, alas. It
did use a similar underlying mechanism to most of these other alternatives,
just in a rather messy way.

I don't think SwitchPipe will rule anything, but perhaps once it's up on
Github (instead of SVN) and I release the next version, more baby steps can be
made. I'd love to make it even more simple somehow, and perhaps port it to a
much faster base (probably Python).

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davidw
Yeah, I've had good luck with mod_fcgid, actually. I don't have _that_ much
traffic, but I like the fact that the software takes care of setting up and
tearing down new instances of the application server, rather than having to
take a wild guess at how many mongrel instances might be needed per virtual
host. This is something that mod_rails also promises to do well.

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zapnap
Article links to screencast. gem install passenger should pull down
passenger-1.0.1. taking a look...

