You should look at Unicorn as an alternative to Passenger for your Rails apps. You just send it a USR2 for zero downtime deploys. Pretty nice setup. https://gi

You should look at Unicorn as an alternative to Passenger for your Rails apps. You just send it a USR2 for zero downtime deploys. Pretty nice setup. https://github.com/blog/517-unicorn https://github.com/blog/517-unicorn http://unicorn.bogomips.org/ http://unicorn.bogomips.org/ Varnish isn't a webserver. You can put Varnish in front of nginx as well. :) Agreed on the blocking. On large sites, I've been doing a single HAProxy instance -> nginx instance on each webserver -> Unicorn app server on each webserver with really good results.