mod-rails / phusion passenger on apache: Really slow

Question

I installed redmine on the apache and used mod_ruby first, which was incredible slow... now i switched to phusion passenger but the response time is still really slow ( talking about 5-6 seconds here, even using a wget to localhost from the server itself.. )

i just removed the "old" mods from the apache dir, but it's still slow... anyway, the logfile at least shows, that the passenger is used:

127.0.0.1 - - [15/Nov/2009:10:38:25 +0000] "OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "Apache/2.2.9
(Debian) Phusion_Passenger/2.2.5 PHP/5.2.6-1+lenny3 with Suhosin-Patch mod_ssl/2.2.9 
OpenSSL/0.9.8g mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5.10.0 (internal dummy connection)"

I have no idea why this happens, the server should be fast enough.. apache-log isn't showing anything suspicious..

EDIT:

Thanks for the hint.. The "passenger-status" is "empty":

----------- General information -----------
max      = 6
count    = 0
active   = 0
inactive = 0
Waiting on global queue: 0

Any advice? Thanks!

Answer 1

Try increasing the PoolIdleTime setting (which is 2 Minutes by default I think). Setting it to 0 helped speed the startup of my Redmine stack a lot. Check out this question on Serverfault on which values to set.

Answer 2

You can use the config option PassengerMinInstances, avaliable since Passenger 3.0.0. This setting allows you to tell Apache how many instances of your deployment must stay alive, even when your applications have been idle for a logner period than the defined by PoolIdleTime. Have a look at the Phusion Passenger docs . There are some otrher usefull options to improve your deoployment's performance.

This answer may be a bit outdated --I'm quite sure almost everyone know the new features of Passenger, but I wasn't, and this question helped a lot.

Answer 3

I found a tool ( http://www.wekkars.com ) that keeps my application alive. I just updated the PoolIdleTime to 30 minutes and the tool does the rest...