What’s the story morning glory?
Thought I’d give you guys a little update on where we currently stand (yeah, we’re still alive ;)). As you may have already know, we’ve announced Phusion Passenger (a.k.a. mod_rails) last week and the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive!
Our beta testers now not only include several of the Ruby on Rails core team, but also some of the largest Ruby on Rails webhosts you may know of. 
Needless to say, we’re very thrilled about this, and in particular, we’d like to thank Pratik Naik, David Heinemeier Hansson and Derek Perez for their insightful feedback and support. Also, we’d like to thank community members such as Russel Norris for keeping the conversations fun. With this kind of support, we’re convinced of the quality of Passenger, since a lot of love has gone into making this.
Again, we’d like to express our gratitude to all for supporting us on this. It’s important to note that for an open source project, it’s things like these that keep developers like us going on.
And while we’re on the subject of ‘going on’: we’ve been working around the clock the past few days to get things done as fast as we can. While Passenger is nearing completion and its website still needs a bit of work, it still remains uncertain if we’re able to obtain a preview/announcement slot at Railsconf . We’d like to let you guys know however, that we’re putting a lot of effort into making this happen, since we really believe that Passenger has the potential to set of a revolution in the Rubyverse by possibly allowing more people to enjoy Ruby on Rails.
For now we ask you for your patience and we’ll try to keep you guys posted on a regular basis regarding our activity.
With kind regards we are,
LisaK said,
March 27, 2008 @ 1:20 pm
Fantastic news — thanks for all of your work!
roger said,
March 27, 2008 @ 5:33 pm
Rock on this is just the type of thing that rails needs to be accepted more, and be far far less painful to deploy.
Some random thoughts: I assume you fork per request? Some niceties would be to be able to have a ‘timeout’ per request.
Perhaps another useful one would be the optional ability to limit the size of the process as it is running (and kill it should it grow too large).
It would also be nice if apache were trained to return the ‘right’ headers for assets, as well (i.e. cacheable :forever appropriately).
Good job. I submitted a suggestion to ruby central that they sponsor a Google Summer of Code to help the project
Take care.
-R
Hongli said,
March 27, 2008 @ 6:24 pm
No, that would be inefficient. We do resource pooling. The exact algorithm is well-documented and will be available to developers once it has been released. Assets such as images and stylesheets (as well as page caching files) do not go through Rails at all, resulting in a huge performance boost. Advanced process management features such as process size limits is beyond the scope of version 1.0, but might be interesting to look at for future versions.
Thanks