Does/can Passenger use clusters like Mongrel?

Question

I'm just curious if Passenger does or can utilize clusters like Mongrel can. If so, how can I specifically run Passenger with clusters? I'm using nginx. And if not, how does it outperform Mongrel so well?

Answer 1

Mongrel Cluster just runs a specified number of Mongrel processes and assigns incoming HTTP requests to them using Apache's mod_proxy_balancer module which acts as a reverse proxy and performs load balancing.

Passenger spawns worker (Ruby) processes to handle HTTP requests using one of three different and configurable strategies . When Passenger's smart spawning method is used it is able to cache the Ruby on Rails framework code, which significantly decreases spawn time. Passenger is also able to re-use the already loaded Ruby interpreter, rather than loading a new one for each process.