Switch…

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.

I was ignorantly happily letting my gems be pulled in automatically on my previous server using Nginx + Mongrel_Cluster and this seemed to pose no problems.

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!