Phusion Passenger 3.0 Public Beta 1 is out

http://blog.phusion.nl/2010/09/15/phusion-passenger-3-0-0-public-beta-1-is-out/

by akitaonrails • 16 years ago

158 21 16 years ago

blog.phusion.nl

The best deployment solution for Ruby on Rails apps just got better! Test it, and see what it can do for you!

jimwise• 16 years ago

One tip on writing announcements like this -- always include a blurb at the start saying what your product, um, is.

I've now read the full announcement. I know that there is a new version of Phusion Passenger coming out, and that a beta is available now.

Problem is, when I clicked the link, I didn't know what Phusion Passenger was -- and I still don't...

steveklabnik• 16 years ago

Think "mod_rails". apache/nginx module to run Rack based applications.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phusion_Passenger

grandalf• 16 years ago

You might want to check the following useful resource:

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=phusion+passenger

aw3c2• 16 years ago

If you too had no idea what this is and why people are upvoting like crazy in celebration, Wikipedia (or rather DuckDuckGo's info box!) says:

Phusion Passenger is a module for the Apache HTTP Server and nginx for deployment of Ruby applications, including those built using the Ruby on Rails framework.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phusion_Passenger

ninh2• 16 years ago

Woops, sorry about that, we've included a description now at the introtext to take that into consideration. Thanks for letting us know :-)

helium• 16 years ago

I wonder if Mongrel2 might kill Passenger like it killed Mongrel?

bnoordhuis• 16 years ago

I doubt it. Different design goals: Passenger makes deploying Ruby web apps easy, Mongrel2 aims to be the Swiss army knife of networked servers.

compay• 16 years ago

I doubt it. But I suppose somebody could potentially build a product around Mongrel2 which does.

EvilTrout• 16 years ago

I never ran Phusion in production for long because of the issue with blocking when spawning, and now I see it's been fixed: http://blog.phusion.nl/2010/07/29/the-road-to-passenger-3-te...

In fact, looking through the site, the changes that make up Phusion 3 are incredible. If it works as advertised, there should be no advantages to running Unicorn or a pack of Mongrels anymore. I can hardly wait to try it out!

chuhnk• 16 years ago

If passenger performs at the same level as or better than unicorn then its probably going to be the best implementation out there for ruby apps, especially with the choice between modules and standalone.

Some of us dont actually require the "ease of deployment" as performance is the priority, phusion passenger was never about performance as they've previously stated. While the new release is faster than their previous stable, it is still yet to be seen whether it out performs unicorn.

I'll reserve judgement until its been benchmarked against the other available deployment servers.

FooBarWidget4• 16 years ago

I really don't like making statements relative to other app servers. Each app server has its own merits and we believe people should decide things for themselves by running their own benchmarks and tests. However this question has been asked so many times that I'm inclined to answer in order to avoid confusion and in order to encourage people to test things independently.

There exists a belief among some people that Unicorn is faster than Phusion Passenger 2. We've tested this a while ago and it turned out that they're evenly matched. Unicorn's speed is on par with Mongrel's. Unicorn's shared socket helps with fairly load balancing requests between processes but its positive effect on performance is not always significant. We've actually experimented with shared sockets and found that, when done improperly, it can actually hurt performance thanks to the thundering herd problem and the fact that catching EINTR in Ruby is expensive. All of Unicorn's I/O is handled in Ruby. A lot of Phusion Passenger's I/O is handled in C++. Instead we've opted to optimize our global queuing implementation to reach the same load balancing effect while speeding things up.

Phusion Passenger 3's speed surpasses Phusion Passenger 2 by far. You draw your own conclusions.

Of course you can take my answer with a grain of salt. I encourage you to verify these findings yourself.

xentronium3• 16 years ago

Excuse my stupidity, if you can, but does passenger (+nginx) hold any advantage before nginx + single multithreaded thin instance with ruby 1.9.2?

thibaut_barrere• 16 years ago

The first one that comes to mind is that you don't have to keep the thin instance alive (eg: /etc/init.d or god scripts or SMF manifests if you're on Solaris).

ninh2• 16 years ago

Ease of use, dynamic spawning of new processes and spinning them down according to the traffic you receive as opposed to a static pool of processes, fault tolerant to crashes through watchdog process which will automatically restart as much for you as it can in such an event, concurrently handling of multiple requests as opposed to a single request (thin has a multithread option but this is experimental iirc, so I'm not sure how this works yet in production). Basically less moving parts.

xentronium3• 16 years ago

Thin uses mongrel / eventmachine / rack, all non-blocking concurrent libraries. Backed up by a good ORM (I use DataMapper, but AR may have got its concurrency patches), you may roll out quite a fast application with quite a low-end server machine.

So it all basically comes down to ease of deploy against more controlled environment. I think every new rails application should use 1.9.2 and rails 3 by now. Concurrency should not be an issue.

SingAlong• 16 years ago

what excites me is the standalone version (or perhaps "standalone mode" if that's right). It comes with an nginx core, so those who just want to launch quickly without any extra work can just do with that and then worry about scalability after gaining traction :)

Thanks to Phusion

byw• 16 years ago

I really like the zero-downtime restart. Are there other servers beside Phusion Passenger 3 and Unicorn with this feature?

Phusion Passenger 3.0 Public Beta 1 is out

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