As for "the stuff that got downloaded and compiled on my machine", that's Nginx being downloaded and compiled there. Nginx is a high-performance, lightweight, e

As for "the stuff that got downloaded and compiled on my machine", that's Nginx being downloaded and compiled there. Nginx is a high-performance, lightweight, extremely stable, battle-tested and proven web server. Hypothetically speaking, it's possible to modify Phusion Passenger to not download and install Nginx. We can run on a pure-Ruby web server like WEBrick. However I guarantee you, WEBrick sucks; it's slow, buggy and leaks memory.