Phusion Passenger 4.0 Release Candidate 4 – Phusion Corporate Blog

http://blog.phusion.nl/2013/03/05/phusion-passenger-4-0-release-candidate-4/#.UTX0dkXh9so.hackernews

by Ruphin • 13 years ago

27 5 13 years ago

blog.phusion.nl

neya2• 13 years ago

Can someone please explain what are the benefits of using Phusion passenger over Unicorn? Just (genuinely) curious..

Here's a short list of things Phusion Passenger 4 supports that are not found in Unicorn or implemented better than in Unicorn:

- Support for multiple Ruby interpreters inside the same instance. But to be fair Unicorn is designed to be run in a different way so this may or may not be an advantage for you.

- JRuby support.

- Python support, and in the future more languages.

- Dynamically adjust the number of processes based on traffic.

- Real-time disk-backed response buffering, first introduced in 4.0 beta 1. Unicorn relies on web server buffering which tends to buffer the entire response before sending it to the client. Phusion Passenger 4 allows you to use Rails 4 streaming with ease, without blocking the server on slow clients, with good performance and without configuration.

- Phusion Passenger Enterprise supports multithreading, allowing you to use it for I/O-bound, long-running requests. Unicorn is strictly single-threaded multi-processing only and can only be used for short-running fast requests, by design.

- Rolling restarts (as implemented in Enterprise) are more automated and efficient than in Unicorn. Phusion Passenger Enterprise restarts processes one-by-one and only requires 1 config line. Unicorn's rolling restarts temporarily requires double memory. You can make it restart one-by-one but it requires manual scripting work involving signals.

- Out-of-Band Work. This is like Unicorn's Out-of-Band GC, but is more flexible: you can perform any arbitrary work (not just GC), and it also works with multithreaded programs. Phusion Passenger also spawns a new process before performing Out-of-Band Work so that your visitors never have to wait. - Deployment error resistance (Enterprise feature). - Live IRB console (Enterprise feature). - Commercial support with guaranteed response times.

I wrote this response quickly so I may have missed some things. If anybody spots any inaccuracies, please let me know.

cmer• 13 years ago

I think you're actually missing the main reason why people use Passenger: ease of deployment.

Not having to manage Unicorn forks, processes, sending USR2 signals etc is the reason why I use Passenger. I personally couldn't care less about the fancy features.

neya2• 13 years ago

Thank you very much for such an elaborate reply!

Cheers

Phusion Passenger 4.0 Release Candidate 4 – Phusion Corporate Blog

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