Which of these would be the best Ruby on Rails server setup?

Question

Here are my choices:

• Apache 2 and Passenger
• nginx and Mongrel Cluster
• nginx and Passenger

It's a Linux VPS with 256 MB RAM. So, which do you recommend?

Answer 1

I would be going with Apache2 and Passenger as it's super simple to setup and scales well. Also grab the Ruby Enterprise Edition if you're concerned about memory and speed.

Answer 2

nginx uses less memory than Apache, given the size of your setup I would definitely recommend that. Mongrel is OK, but a little dated, and a pain to keep it under control and controlling its memory size. Passenger is a great way to run Ruby on Rails applications, so I would recommend that also. nginx and Passenger, definitely the way to go. My latest business application is running great in production with nginx and Passenger so it is definitely production ready. An added bonus is that nginx serves static and cached content even faster than Apache.

Answer 3

Nginx and Mongrel is supposed to be the tried and true setup.

However, Passenger is supposed to be more memory friendly.