After stearing clear of Apache2 for the last year for all production servers I'm now ready to give it another try, thanks to Phusion's Passenger. I've grown really tired of setting up god scripts for all environments and fighting mongrel's pidfile suckage.
Far too many times have things failed because of a dead worker in the cluster or some stale or (even worse!) non-existent pidfiles on the system. Mongrel has served well, but it's time to look for something better.
A typical setup I use is nginx as the front-end server doing all static content while a pack of mongrels is handling the Rails requests through reverse proxy. nginx is also very important for reproxying requests, where content is streamed from another internal server over the front facing servers. In most of the Rails app I'm writing I have to deal with very large files (audio, video) so reproxy is essential if you want to have any sort of performance on a reasonable budget. Since Apache2 lacks reproxy support (AFAIK, please prove me wrong!) I really want to keep nginx as the front-end server and then do the Rails handling with Apache2 + Passenger through reverse proxy.
I've come a cross a couple of posts on this very topic.
I'll be doing some heavy development and testing over the next couple of days with this setup, will post my findings...
