What is Passenger?

Passenger (a.k.a mod_rails), built by the Phusion team Hongli Lai and Ninh Bui) allows Ruby on Rails deployment to be as simple as uploading/updating your files and touching a blank tmp/restart.txt file to signal a restart.

Do you recommend deploying Rails apps with Passenger?

The short answer is it depends on expected traffic. While mod_rails has shown to be faster and as equally robust as Mongrel, we've found that for applications with less than ~1500 dynamic requests per day (~0.17 TPS) in a shared environment we still recommend using Mongrel or Thin. (more on this below)

How does Passenger compare to Mongrel/Thin in a shared hosting environment?

From our experience of hosting Passenger for over a year now, we've witnessed that for low-traffic apps, Mongrel/Thin clusters can be more responsive in a shared hosting environment because they are "always on." In other words, when Passenger processes die off there is a short delay as they fire up again (similar to what happens with FastCGI instances). Therefore, if you are expecting less than ~1500 dynamic requests per day (~0.17 TPS) and need fast initial response times, we would highly recommend deploying with Mongrel or Thin. (You can always run tests yourself between them as you initially deploy).

How can I deploy my Rails apps with Passenger on HostingRails.com?

Upload your app, symlink RAILS_ROOT/public to your account's ~/public_html and contact support to configure your apache vhost to use mod_rails. Also be sure to check out our simple tutorials to deploy with Passenger with Git (or SVN) and Capistrano.

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