3 ms·

So, this is only really better than straight up nginx if you were to put more than one application behind it, for some reason?

FooBarWidget 13y ago
No. For example "Process management and supervision", "Scaling" and "Statistics and insight" are extra features that you get by using Phusion Passenger. You can't do those easily with just Node + Nginx.
bradleyland 13y ago
If you're an app guy, I can understand why you look at it like that. App guys tend to trust software/solutions they write themselves. Any excess (features you don't need) is seen as opportunities for optimization. My background is more on the sysadmin side, and I think that's why I lean heavily toward Passenger in all my Ruby/Rack deployments, despite the availability of hip new app servers available for Ruby apps. The thing that Passenger does exceedingly well is deliver a toolchain that sysadmins will love. FooBarWidget's list is very good. Even if you're single-tenant, Passenger's process management and supervision has worked wonderfully for me. Toolchain, toolchain, toolchain! Passenger comes with utilities like passenger-status and passenger-memory-stats. You can, at a glance, see things like how much memory (true, RSS) an app process is using, or what your queues look like. Another distinction is completeness of the solution. With a lot of other app server solutions, hashing out the finer details are up to you. I don't have any experience with Node.js, but with the other Ruby app servers I've tried, you're responsible for things like finding/writing your own init script and process supervision. Can I write an init script? Yes. Will it fail to cover an edge case that I haven't thought of yet? Probably. How well will it be written? About as well as I have time for at the time I write it. Could I find one online? Sure. How well is it written? Well, it seems popular. Is it maintained? Uh... How will I track updates? Uuuuuuh... I don't need the deep level of customization provided by the roll-your-own solution. The folks at Passenger are really, really smart, and I'm humble. I'd rather leverage their domain expertise than to try and be a master of all things. My time is also valuable. If I accept that the Passenger solution is well engineered and provides additional value (see their list above), what value will I derive from [rolling my own|an alternative] solution? If I can't come up with a clear answer to that question, I stick with Passenger.

FooBarWidget 13y ago

No. For example "Process management and supervision", "Scaling" and "Statistics and insight" are extra features that you get by using Phusion Passenger. You can't do those easily with just Node + Nginx.

bradleyland 13y ago

If you're an app guy, I can understand why you look at it like that. App guys tend to trust software/solutions they write themselves. Any excess (features you don't need) is seen as opportunities for optimization. My background is more on the sysadmin side, and I think that's why I lean heavily toward Passenger in all my Ruby/Rack deployments, despite the availability of hip new app servers available for Ruby apps. The thing that Passenger does exceedingly well is deliver a toolchain that sysadmins will love. FooBarWidget's list is very good. Even if you're single-tenant, Passenger's process management and supervision has worked wonderfully for me. Toolchain, toolchain, toolchain! Passenger comes with utilities like passenger-status and passenger-memory-stats. You can, at a glance, see things like how much memory (true, RSS) an app process is using, or what your queues look like. Another distinction is completeness of the solution. With a lot of other app server solutions, hashing out the finer details are up to you. I don't have any experience with Node.js, but with the other Ruby app servers I've tried, you're responsible for things like finding/writing your own init script and process supervision. Can I write an init script? Yes. Will it fail to cover an edge case that I haven't thought of yet? Probably. How well will it be written? About as well as I have time for at the time I write it. Could I find one online? Sure. How well is it written? Well, it seems popular. Is it maintained? Uh... How will I track updates? Uuuuuuh... I don't need the deep level of customization provided by the roll-your-own solution. The folks at Passenger are really, really smart, and I'm humble. I'd rather leverage their domain expertise than to try and be a master of all things. My time is also valuable. If I accept that the Passenger solution is well engineered and provides additional value (see their list above), what value will I derive from [rolling my own|an alternative] solution? If I can't come up with a clear answer to that question, I stick with Passenger.