I had a hell of a time wondering what was going wrong with my webserver under load and finally found the answer here.

Turns out that Apache Bench takes the first pulled request and compares the length to all subsequent requests. Makes sense for a purely static page, but when you have a random image cropping up, you’re sure to see at least a couple bits difference in length.

So if you’re serving straight, hand coded HTML, enjoy the feeling of knowing that you’re getting the same length content each and every time… but if you’re like the rest of us (and anyone who would actually be using Apache Bench) feel free to rage that there’s no command line switch to turn off that silly notification.

That’s all I have to say. Passenger/mod_rails is so much faster and more competent at serving my crappy RoR code than my hacked together mongrel/nginx scheme that I had before.

My ram usage spikes much more when visitors hit the site, but never starts swapping. The increased ram usage is more than worth it for the HUGELY increased speed that I’m seeing by the dynamic mongrel management.

Even better, when the visitors leave (as often happens), the ram usage settles down to the same place it did with my nginx and mongrel combo.

Enjoy the increased speed and stability AMDavidson.com visitors.

BUT! when I switched to a new host, I went with an Apache + Passenger (mod_rails) setup and my servers would start but would just offer “Error 500″.

I checked the logs and it seemed that it wasn’t loading RedCloth so I added the following to my environment.rb file and it all worked fine!