I'm one of the authors behind Phusion Passenger (https://www.phusionpassenger.com/), a polyglot web server for Ruby, Python and Node.js.
We've recently written a comprehensive comparison between Puma and Phusion Passenger, which you can read here: https://github.com/phusion/passenger/wiki/Puma-vs-Phusion-Pa...
The comparison covers things like concurrency models, I/O models, security, clustering, multi-app support, documentation, memory usage, performance and more. Although the comparison is between Puma and Phusion Passenger, a lot of the points are relevant to a Unicorn-Puma comparison as well.
Please stop making your comparisons sound as if passenger-free was a fully functional application server such as unicorn or puma. It is not.
Passenger-free is a deliberately crippled demo-version. If someone wants to use passenger in production they will have to pay $50 USD per year, per server for it. And you know that very well.
The 'free' passenger drops requests and serves 502 errors to the users during every single deploy.
That's equivalent to popping up shareware nag-screens into my face at random intervals. Except phusion passenger doesn't nag me, it nags my customers.
You call the avoidance of these errors a 'feature' ('rolling restarts') that must be paid for.
For some reason your helpful comparisons never mention that both unicorn[1] and puma[2] ship with this basic functionality out of the box. One could almost think it is part of your sales strategy to have people notice this little 'limitation' only after they already deployed your product to production...
I've been using Passenger since it was called Apache mod_rails http://www.concept47.com/austin_web_developer_blog/ruby-on-r... you have to remember that before the Phusion guys showed up, there was no easy way to run a rails server without proxying requests to mongrel, thin or something like that. instances could bloat in memory or die and your app could, for whatever reason, go down and you wouldn't know it. Did I mention that rails apps were also pretty slow back then?
They made deploying and maintaining rails an order of magnitude easier with Passenger, first with the mindblowingly simple installation process and later by introducing ideas like killing and spinning up new app instances after xxx requests, or spinning instances up or down depending on activity. All this with simple configuration switches out the box. Even the advances in Passenger 4 are pretty amazing (threaded mode, and out-of-band garbage collection, come to mind)
What I'm saying is, they've done a lot for the Rails ecosystem and while I'm not a fan of their new pricing strategy with Passenger or their marketing tack with Puma posts on this thread, I think its worthwhile to be a bit more gentle in chiding them because of their peerless contributions in the past ... plus their link is actually a very well written comparison
Unicorn improved upon Mongrel in many ways, and it is interesting technology. We know, because we are Unicorn contributors ourselves (take a look at the AUTHORS file). However Phusion Passenger did not stay behind. Since the introduction of Unicorn, we introduced Phusion Passenger Standalone, which allows you to use Phusion Passenger in a Unicorn-like manner (e.g. you can attach it to an Nginx reverse proxy, and it uses a Unicorn-like architecture). Since then, we've even improved upon Unicorn. For example, the out-of-band garbage collection that Unicorn has? We've made it better with out-of-band work. Administration tools for querying the status of workers? passenger-status and passenger-memory-stats do it better than Unicorn. Python support? Not in Unicorn. And so on.
Phusion Passenger is used to full satisfaction by many large parties, such as Motorola, UPS, Hitachi, etc. So if you can point out technical reasons why you think our product is "mediocre", please feel free to tell us, and we'll fix them.
Most apps where you would be concerned with downtime have load balancers in front of them. This isn't burning fire you make out because you can pull one app server out of the pool, restart and then put it back in once it is restarted. We do this by using keepalived and renaming a chk.txt file in the root.
Moe, I don't understand where your hostility comes from. It is fine if you don't like Phusion Passenger, but please don't say things that are untrue.
The open source version of Phusion Passenger is not a crippled version. It is used in production by many large users, including New York Times, AirBnB, etc. Your statement that the open source version is "crippled" goes right against the fact that we've been actively developing the open source version ever since Enterprise came out. In fact, open source development has become more active after Enterprise than before, thanks to Enterprise funds. If you check our commits at Github you will see that the rate of development has accelerated. If you take a look at all the new features in the open source version of Phusion Passenger 4 you will see that it is improving at a tremendous rate.
It is not true that the open source Phusion Passenger drops requests and serves 502 errors to users on every single deploy. Upon touching restart.txt, the open source versions blocks requests and resumes them after having restarting 1 process. The blocking only happens for the first process, not for the ones after. At no point will requests be dropped or will errors be served. We even have integration tests in place to check for this. If you see request drops or errors in the open source version, please contact us and we'll have a better look at the problem. If it's a bug, we'll fix, it's that simple.
"popping up shareware nag-screens at random intervals" is completely false. There are absolutely no nag-screens in Phusion Passenger. The open source version of Phusion Passenger is open source, so if you don't believe me, then dig into the source code and tell me where exactly the nag screens are.
The lack of rolling restarts in the open source version is not a secret. Our documentation clearly mentions the differences between the open source and the Enterprise version. With a few clicks, you can find out what the open source version does and does not have.
And actually, the open source version does not "lack" rolling restarts, it just does not automate it for you. You can implement rolling restarts using Phusion Passenger Standalone (open source version!) in the same way you do with Thin and Mongrel, i.e. by swapping sockets. It works fine and some of our users do exactly this. It is just more work than the automated, polished, error-resistant version that Enterprise offers.
And finally, you Unicorn and Puma "fully-functional" while implying that Phusion Passenger is not. This is not true. There are features in the open source version of Phusion Passenger that Puma and Unicorn does not have. The reverse is also true. It is even true that Unicorn has some features that Puma has and vice versa.
I'm pretty sure you literally said "popping up shareware nag-screens at random intervals" instead of "that's equivalen to", but whatever, I'll take your word for it, in good faith, that you did not edit your post and that I read your post wrong.
Like I said before: errors during redeploy are not supposed to happen even in the open source version, and if they do happen then we are very interested in fixing them. Please tell us more. There is no need to spin this as being "dishonest". If you don't believe us, tell us about your problem, let us fix it, and verify for yourself that it is fixed. Only the facts matter.
So what does that mean? Experiences differ, for all sorts of reasons, some legit and some not (e.g. inefficient configuration). Neither kinds of posts automatically mean that Unicorn/Phusion Passenger is bad: there will always be people having problems with a particular technology. That's why we encourage people who have problems to contact our support forum.
I'm pretty sure you literally said "popping up shareware nag-screens at random intervals" instead of "that's equivalen to", but whatever, I'll take your word for it, in good faith, that you did not edit your post and that I read your post wrong.
Wait, what...
You edited this line into your reply hours after you initially posted it. Hoping I would miss it or something?
And in this very edit you have the nerve to suggest I edit my comment after the fact to spin shit around?
Look at the position of the 'popping up' phrase in my post. How would saying it in any way other than it's written make any sense, syntactically?
And why would I claim passenger pops up literal nag screens, when everyone knows that's complete nonsense?
I do appreciate you showing your true colors in this thread. I'll make sure to link to it every time I run into one of your 'PR excursions' in the future.
In other news: I've been asking other online communities as well in the hope of finding other users who have experienced the kind of problem you reported (http://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/1lceav/ask_rreddit_doe...). Unfortunately I haven't received a single answer so far. Any feedback from you about the nature of the problem would be greatly appreciated.
My first thought upon reading the article was: "I wonder how this compares to Passenger?". I find it very helpful to get an authoritative link from the Passenger guys themselves in this thread.
Since Passenger is by now pretty much the default way to run a Ruby stack I don't think any one here doesn't know who they are and so they really do not need to spam. They are just contributing to the discussion and I appreciate that.
Is Passenger really the default for most people? I tried it once and honestly prefer just dropping thin or unicorn behind nginx. And with this discussion, I'll probably be trying out puma in the near future.
And you definitely should try Unicorn and Puma. We never said that Unicorn and Puma are bad technologies. In fact, we think they're good technologies. That said, we also think that there are many reasons why one would prefer Phusion Passenger (either open source or Enterprise) over Unicorn or Puma.
One thing that some people don't know about Phusion Passenger is that it is versatile. Phusion Passenger Standalone is a mode, specifically designed to be dropped behind Nginx, just like Thin/Unicorn/Puma. That is a good alternative if you don't like the Apache/Nginx integrated modes.
mwienert, my apologies if it came over as spamming. The reason why I put an introduction in those posts is because last time I posted comments about Phusion Passenger people told me that I should introduce myself as being an author of Phusion Passenger. And as you've noticed in this thread (and not just on HN, see e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18398626/why-did-gitlab-6...), I actually say some very favorable things about Puma, and I thought that people will appreciate it if they know that it came from someone who writes web servers instead of just some random commenter.
But I see your point, and I'll keep it in mind. If I can edit my other posts I would remove some links but unfortunate HN has already frozen them.
We just moved our ruby apps (puppet, Redmine,gitlab) from apache passenger to puma + nginx because passenger is awful - it's slow, bloated and it eats memory.
Ok sorry I re-read that and I sounded quite loaded, I was actually a bit miffed that someone from passenger posted on this puma thread but I suppose they have the right to.
We didn't have a great experience with passenger, it does seem bloated and we decided to move away from apache to nginx for similar reasons.
Tldr; We've been very happy with our move from passenger to puma.
I'm interested in what sort of problems you had with Phusion Passenger. What makes you say it is slow and bloated? We've even had users who switched away from Puma and Unicorn for the exact same reasons you mentioned.
But in our experience the app server is rarely the cause of such problems. Most people who complained about bloat in Unicorn/Puma/Passenger eventually discovered that it was a problem at the application level after all.
We'd be happy to help you with your issues if you can tell us more.
The point of serving Node through Phusion Passenger is not performance, but supervision, stability, robustness, security, multitenancy, etc. Although Phusion Passenger can increase performance by load balancing requests between multiple nodes. Please see https://github.com/phusion/passenger/wiki/Node.js for reasons to use Phusion Passenger with Node.
The cluster module is great, but it requires you to manage your processes yourself and to write your own load balancer. Phusion Passenger provides all this functionality for you for free, through a C++ core.
We've recently written a comprehensive comparison between Puma and Phusion Passenger, which you can read here: https://github.com/phusion/passenger/wiki/Puma-vs-Phusion-Pa... The comparison covers things like concurrency models, I/O models, security, clustering, multi-app support, documentation, memory usage, performance and more. Although the comparison is between Puma and Phusion Passenger, a lot of the points are relevant to a Unicorn-Puma comparison as well.