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.
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