

Phusion Passenger 4.0.1 final release - edwinvlieg
http://blog.phusion.nl/2013/05/06/phusion-passenger-4-0-1-final-release/

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FooBarWidget
Check out this new Phusion Passenger 4.x series. It has much, MUCH improved
performance, stability and features that rivals that of Unicorn, Puma, etc.
It's used by the likes of New York Times, Symantec, AirBnB, etc.

The main reason why people use Phusion Passenger is because of its ease of
use. The way it integrates into Apache and Nginx is unlike other app servers
and saves a lot of administration time and effort.

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pimeys
Our reason to use the Passenger Enterprise version is that it's the only truly
reliable application server for Ruby that handles threads good enough. The
administration tools and how it handles stuff like deployment upgrades to a
huge application server are done remarkably better than in any other Ruby app
server.

Update process loads our application once and forks it to all the workers like
Unicorn does. Puma wanted to load the application as many times as we had
workers, which caused a huge spike every time we deployed.

Same goes to the thread handling. It really seems Passenger is the only Ruby
server able to handle massive loads with threaded Rails app. Money well spent.

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FooBarWidget
Thanks for the good words. :) Do you mind if we use this statement as a
testimonial, with your real name and company name?

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pimeys
Sure, but please ask from the people who actually did the purchase before
writing anything.

<http://www.sponsorpay.com>

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FooBarWidget
How can we improve Phusion Passenger? We're very open to feedback from HN
readers. If you have any suggestions, please let us know. If you have any
questions about it please feel free to ask.

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grk
I'd love to see a 'phusion passenger for background tasks'. Managing large
amounts of resque workers is a pain.

~~~
FooBarWidget
That is a great suggestion, and it has actually been on our minds of a while
now.

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grk
I'd love to beta test this if you ever decide to implement :)

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FooBarWidget
Please subscribe to our mailing list then, we'll keep you up to date about
developments. :)

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lukeholder
If the phusion passenger people built a plugin for cpanel that gave easy
installation and configuration of ruby/pythons app, I really think it could
disrupt the php monopoly on cheap hosting for mid level web devs.

Deployment would be vastly eased to the same php strategy of "just ftp the
files to the server and visit the website".

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Nux
As an admin who unfortunately has to deal with "cheap hosting" quite often I'd
say "Please, NO!" to that.

I don't think RoR and "cheap hosting" are compatible. RoR adds a maintenance
overhead that kills the "cheap" part.

I did admin work for RoR "cheap hosting" and it sucks; lots of gems and
multiple versions of them to install etc; this took a lot of my time and made
security audits very hard, plus it's not always trivial to install them as
some require NEW everything.

Whereas with PHP, 99,9% of the applications run just fine with a relatively
simple PHP installation: e.g. core + xml, mysql, imap, gd, mbstring, mcrypt.
Update it every once in a while and you're all set!

What RoR programmers need is a cheap vps/container with RVM (or similar) or
very specialised platforms (e.g. Heroku).

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bluedino
We have 15-20 apps that all run different versions of gems (including Rails
1-3) and it can be a nightmare. Nobody ever decided to use RVM or anything
like that. A while ago you could update a gem and break 3 apps.

I can't imagine wheat it'd be like on a shared host with 100 apps all made by
different people.

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jrochkind1
> A while ago you could update a gem and break 3 apps.

You aren't using bundler, are you? You really really should be. It eliminates
the vast majority of that class of problem. It's been best practice in Rails,
and ruby deployment in general, to use bundler for several years now, it
really does make that kind of problem go away.

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bluedino
We are in our Rails 3 apps.

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jrochkind1
It is possible to use Bundler even in Rails2 -- if you are getting a lot of
pain from that class of problem, it might be worth it.

Although, really, Rails 2.3x stops getting even security updates very soon, it
might make more sense to focus all your energy on getting off Rails 2 --
although I know very well how incredibly painful that is. You're in for pain
no matter what, sadly.

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relix
I really like the general out-of-bound work feature, however I have a hard
time imagining a use-case that is not garbage-collection, and that wouldn't be
better solved by having a background worker process. Can anyone suggest some
situations?

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FooBarWidget
In theory it can be used for any kind of work that cannot be (easily) passed
to another process, and that would block all threads. Another use case that I
can think of is generating garbage collection statistics. But perhaps the
community can find more use cases, we made it general so that people can be
creative. :)

