Phusion Passenger now supports Nginx

http://blog.phusion.nl/2009/04/16/phusions-one-year-anniversary-gift-phusion-passenger-220/

by _pius • 17 years ago

133 36 17 years ago

blog.phusion.nl

_pius• 17 years ago

It would be difficult to overstate how major this is for the Ruby web app community.

fiaz3• 17 years ago

Especially given the fact that all of those MagLev claims went up in smoke...

icey2• 17 years ago

I don't understand what this has to do with MagLev. (And how did it go up in smoke? According to this http://maglev.gemstone.com/status/index.html it seems like it's still being worked on.)

hboon3• 17 years ago

Isn't that too early to conclude? And they are meant for different purposes anyway.

gnaritas3• 17 years ago

MagLev is a Gemstone object database server, it has nothing to do with this. When it's done, I'm sure the combo will be Nginx + Maglev instead of Nginx + (phusion passenger + mysql).

I've been playing with Gemstone and Seaside lately, it's freaking blazing fast and persistence is automatic, no mapping code at all. You put objects somewhere and they just stay there. No mapping at all beats the crap out of mappings + migrations.

Gemstone is going to make one hell of a web app platform. Especially since you can just add more boxes to the db cluster for scaling it. Only one server can write, but reads are distributed automatically across all servers in the cluster.

dmix• 17 years ago

Finally. I was wary of moving back to apache to use Passenger because I had nginx configured to work perfectly with my app. Now its just a matter replacing mongrel.

gamache2• 17 years ago

I was wary too... then in the space of about ten minutes, I had Apache and Passenger set up and I never had to worry about babysitting my Rails apps again.

I can't wait to try Passenger on Nginx.

sho• 17 years ago

Well, there goes the last reason to bother with mongrels + monit. There was a discussion here a week or two ago where someone was asking about best Rails deployment - the recommendations pretty much came down to Passenger + Apache for ease, or Nginx + mongrels for speed / low memory use.

This is the best of both worlds and pretty much puts Passenger at the top of any deployment best practise list. Well done to them.

phoreo• 17 years ago

This is great to see. I've been curious about trying Passenger, but am addicted to Nginx. Looking forward to playing around, and if the fit is right, deploying with it.

dmillar• 17 years ago

Well, do I stop working on my Passenger-like Nginx module that uses thin?

petercooper2• 17 years ago

Not if it's not sucking up giant amounts of your time (and if you're enjoying working on it). People will still be interested. Just perhaps not as many ;-)

grandalf• 17 years ago

I'd be interested in it -- i love having EM running in the web server...

FooBarWidget• 17 years ago

The reason why EventMachine doesn't work in Phusion Passenger is probably because of forking. You can use the :starting_worker_process event in Phusion Passenger to reinitialize EM after forking (see the docs on spawn methods) or use conservative spawning.

jzting• 17 years ago

nice! has anyone done any benchmarks yet?

davidw• 17 years ago

I'd be willing to bet good money that benchmarks are still going to hinge on the speed of your Ruby app and its database access. Apache, despite not being the "new, new thing" is perfectly capable of saturating pretty much whatever connection you have.

rcoder2• 17 years ago

This is something I keep trying to tell people whenever micro-benchmarks appear showing that such-and-such web server handles >5k concurrent connections within a particular memory footprint, or that this-and-that message queue supports 8k enqueue/dequeue ops per second without hitting disk.

How many Rails apps out there can handle more than, say, 200-300 concurrent clients without either pegging the CPU or bringing the database to its knees?

Putting Passenger behind Nginx just removes a need to install + configure Apache for folks who are already use and like Nginx. It may also have some benefit on memory-constrained environments like entry-level VPS hosts.

That being said, I personally think that folks who spend days or weeks tweaking their deployment to run in <256MB of RAM to save a few bucks a month on hosting should probably reevaluate their priorities.

zacharypinter• 17 years ago

Aside from supporting an existing infrastructure, what are the benefits of choosing Nginx/Passenger over Apache/Passenger in a fresh environment?

Xichekolas• 17 years ago

Biggest advantage off the top of my head is memory usage (which matters when you are on a memory constrained VPS like a 256 slice). Nginx memory usage stays low under lots of load, since it has a constant number of workers and a job queue. I'm not clear on how exactly Apache does it, but my understanding is that it forks a child process to service each request, so under high loads gobbles up memory.

Second graph here illustrates: http://blog.webfaction.com/a-little-holiday-present

Personally, I also find Nginx more straightforward to configure, but I know that is mostly personal preference.

As an aside: I really love Engine Yard for sponsoring the development of this.

rcoder2• 17 years ago

Using a default configuration, Apache actually maintains a pool of worker child processes which handle the actual request processing, rather than forking on every incoming request. You can allow it to fork more workers under load, or keep it locked down to manage resource usage. You can also configure it to use an alternate MPM (Multi-Processing Module) to use thread pools, fork on each request, or some mix of the above.

The difference in resource usage is due more to the fact that Apache is written to be a sort of generic network service platform, rather than a lean-and-mean HTTP server. It allows plug-in modules (whether written in C, or any of the mod_perl/python/ruby/etc. dynamic language bindings) to interact with just about any stage of request processing. In addition, a default Apache install will usually link a large number of other modules in each worker

That being said, tuning Apache for performance + minimal resource usage is a bit of a black art. If you're not comfortable configuring + building your own server package from source, it's probably easier to just grab Nginx and be done with it.

wmf• 17 years ago

Apache isn't that great for serving static content; I've read about plenty of people who use Nginx for static and Apache for dynamic. Now you can use Nginx for everything.

billturner• 17 years ago

And just TWO days ago, I switched two big apps running nginx + thin to running apache + passenger - mainly for the ease of maintenance. If I had only waited two days...

listic• 17 years ago

I hope you've got meaningful experience. Now switching back should be easier. You know, they say the best way to do something right is to do it twice :)

tlrobinson• 17 years ago

Little known fact: Passenger also supports Python WSGI applications/frameworks. Perhaps it will become the de facto replacement for FastCGI.

datums• 17 years ago

I've been working with nginx (haproxy to mongrel) and recently nginx to (apache phusion) , this is the ideal marriage. Awesome news, glad I donated.

ruby_roo• 17 years ago

Phuckin' sweet. I love these guys!

Phusion Passenger now supports Nginx

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