We recently changed our deployment model from an all Capistrano model to a Capistrano plus rsync model. Our old model would take 20 to 45 minutes to update eve

We recently changed our deployment model from an all Capistrano model to a Capistrano plus rsync model. Our old model would take 20 to 45 minutes to update every server in our farm. Our new model updates one staging / deployment server via Capistrano then rsyncs to each of our production nodes. This process normally takes less then a minute and spikes to a few minutes for really large changes. We still have the ability to rollback code and this model is actually quicker at fixing bad deployments then our old model was. A majority of our time before was spent updating both our codebase then checking external dependencies on each server. Rsync made this process much quicker since these checks are completed once then pushed to each server.