
Introducing Phusion Passenger 5 beta 1, codename “Raptor” - narfz
http://blog.phusion.nl/2014/11/25/introducing-phusion-passenger-5-beta-1-codename-raptor/
======
xinuc
As a happy and satisfied Passenger Enterprise user, I'd say that Passenger
does deserve a better attention from ruby community. Just because it's (too)
easy to use, doesn't mean it can't perform well.

We still use version 4 and benchmark it with unicorn and the likes, and we
found no noticeable different on performance, except the fact that it's easier
to configure and manage.

------
MattRogish
We've been using Passenger at RailsMachine.com since they released it, and
have always been impressed with the team and the performance of the product
(across hundreds of customer applications on thousands of app servers) over
the years.

I had been following Raptor and actually had no idea it was by the Phusion
folks. Guess I didn't pay close enough attention! Very excited to test the
betas and see how it performs across our network.

In benchmarks with customer's systems against Passenger4, Puma, and Unicorn,
we have not seen anything that would suggest a general-case migration to any
of those would be advisable for apps without a specific workload reason.

We have a number of folks on the Enterprise product, primarily for zero
downtime restarts. I think "Immutable Infrastructure" plus load balancer
support would negate the need for this, if you've got the orchestration in
place. I'm curious how Phusion responds to that becoming more and more
popular/prevalent.

------
whizzkid
I just installed this to our test server and impressed by results actually

We had 100 req/sec on our 2gb test server.

We got 170 req/sec without any tuning by using the same config

Im sure i can tune it little more to get it to 200 req/sec, which is a lot
improvement to previous version. Well done guys!

------
philnash
I'm a little disappointed. Not that it was a marketing stunt, that was clear
from the outset, and it worked well.

I'm disappointed they're dropping the Raptor name, it just sounds so much
better than "Phusion Passenger".

------
jsnk
I am glad this wasn't just a vapourware. Given that it's an improved
Passenger, I can believe all the hype.

[edit] Actually trying it out on my dev machine right now. I am getting a
random error that I normally don't get with thin server. Doesn't play well
with pry either right now. I'll wait a bit until it goes out of beta.

~~~
cookrn
Passenger does not "play well" with vanilla Pry at all. This is simply the
result of the way that it works. I would recommend using pry-remote [0] if
your app is running inside of Passenger.

[0] [http://rubygems.org/gems/pry-remote](http://rubygems.org/gems/pry-remote)

------
rubiquity
I'm always disappointed when an open source-ish tool has to market itself.
Unicorn didn't market itself. Its users marketed Unicorn because it
worked/works so well.

I also don't think the comparisons Raptor is doing are fair. You're comparing
an application server with a cache against just application servers. Also, I
would expect Raptor's memory usage to be higher once that cache starts to fill
up, or maybe you've created a super small cache just for "Hello World" apps.

People aren't avoiding Passenger because "it's too easy to use", a lot of
people avoid Passenger because you're a weird company. Application servers are
very important, perhaps too important to be tied to a commercial entity.

I applaud you on the work (code-wise) you've put into this and I hope the
entire Ruby community as a whole benefits from it, like you claim we have with
older versions of Passenger (which kinda seems like revisionist history to me,
but oh well).

~~~
steveklabnik
> Unicorn didn't market itself.

You don't remember "I love Unicorn because it's UNIX?"
[http://tomayko.com/writings/unicorn-is-
unix](http://tomayko.com/writings/unicorn-is-unix) as well as GitHub's
postings about using Unicorn?

I admit this particular campaign makes me a bit... unhappy. But every open
source project does marketing, explicit or implicit.

~~~
rubiquity
Was Ryan Tomayko involved in Unicorn? My point was that it would be different
if Eric Wong wrote a post like that. Ryan Tomayko taking the time to write
that post is exactly my point: good tools spread by having users that love
them.

~~~
whistlerbrk
I think that's why he mentioned "implicit" marketing. In this day we're often
fond of saying "the best products market themselves" but that usually means
through evangelism via it's users.

------
natejenkins
Does Passenger 5 support hot reloading? This was the reason I switched to
Unicorn a few years ago.

~~~
pselbert
They support phased restart, more in line with how puma does a full reload.
This is more useful IMO, provided you have multi threading enabled. With pure
process concurrency you have a higher memory overhead though, as the master
doesn't preload the app before forking, preventing copy on write savings.

------
davidw
What I liked about Passenger from the get-go is that it figures out how many
instances to keep active, given some initial parameters and how much traffic
you're getting. That is _so_ much more right than what others were doing back
then, which was just starting N instances and hoping N was a good number.

------
shawabawa3
I'm really disappointed zero downtime restarts are still an enterprise only
feature.

I absolutely cannot justify spending $30/server month on passenger - that's
more than the boxes I'm running it on cost - and zero downtime restarts are a
must-have for me.

~~~
FooBarWidget
If you are on a tight budget then maybe you are eligible for the startup
discount. Phusion offers this discount as a genuine effort to help cash-
strapped startups and students. The Phusion Passenger website has more info.

------
meesterdude
ah-ha! it was Phusion all along. very clever marketing efforts. I wish they
could have traded on just the facts, but it's clear they got more buzz taking
this path.

Kudos to them!

------
jhonovich
How much of an improvement is Passenger 5 over Version 4?

~~~
FooBarWidget
A lot.

It's much faster. Learn more at
[http://www.rubyraptor.org/](http://www.rubyraptor.org/) and
[http://www.rubyraptor.org/how-we-made-raptor-up-
to-4x-faster...](http://www.rubyraptor.org/how-we-made-raptor-up-to-4x-faster-
than-unicorn-and-up-to-2x-faster-than-puma-torquebox/)

It has better tooling for helping you to identify and solve problems.

------
grandalf
I thought the marketing campaign was clever. Trying to give it a try and can't
seem to find the gem name and example Procfile configuration.

~~~
FooBarWidget
Gem name is 'passenger'. See the documentation for installation instructions.

Example Procfile configuration: [https://github.com/phusion/passenger-ruby-
heroku-demo](https://github.com/phusion/passenger-ruby-heroku-demo). Note that
the demo locks down to Phusion Passenger 4 by default. If you want to try 5,
don't forget to bump the version number in the Gemfile.

