5 ms·

Phusion Passenger 5.0.1 “Raptor” Released

65 points by cmpb 12y ago

pastullo 12y ago
worth upgrading from unicorn for a few thousands visitors per month?
- Xorlev 12y ago
  Nope. You'll be fine on whatever you're running on. Even Webrick.
  - tinco 12y ago
    Just to be clear (not sure if you're kidding) but people use Passenger (and production application servers in general) not just because they meet some minimum throughput threshold. Passenger takes care of keeping your application alive, makes sure slow clients don't break it, automatically handles concurrency and has low latency. That's just the basics, there's a lot of configuration options for the more serious deployments.
    - mahouse 12y ago
      How does Passenger compare to unicorn? (I'm curious)
      - wasd 12y ago
        Passenger and Unicorn (from Passenger): https://github.com/phusion/passenger/wiki/Unicorn-vs-Phusion-Passenger https://github.com/phusion/passenger/wiki/Unicorn-vs-Phusion... Passenger and Puma (from Passenger): https://github.com/phusion/passenger/wiki/Puma-vs-Phusion-Passenger https://github.com/phusion/passenger/wiki/Puma-vs-Phusion-Pa...
    - Xorlev 12y ago
      Sure, but at a few thousand visitors a month that clocks in around one request every 10 minutes or so. I'm not saying they shouldn't use Passenger or another production app server (I use Unicorn fronted by nginx personally), but it'd honestly probably be fine with Webrick. I'm also not saying that Webrick is what they'd want to be on since it doesn't really have any supervision or real smarts.
      - bryanlarsen 12y ago
        With that few requests, the wrong app server will terminate the process, meaning that every request will endure massive startup costs. It also probably means that the server is on a $5 VM, so memory pressure is also a concern.
ohcoder 12y ago
Cool!
fideloper 12y ago
As a (primarily) developer who is also in the DevOps "space", I'm wondering if anyone knows Phusion's usage popularity over "rolling your own" (unicorn) or Paas (Heroku) usage? The enterprise features seem really great, although per server charging is definitely in the Enterprise range of $$$ !
- mperham 12y ago
  People dramatically underestimate the amount of time necessary to support a complex project like Passenger. Phusion earns every dime of that Enterprise pricing.
- WillPostForFood 12y ago
  I think they built their popularity by being the first really easy way to use Rails with Apache. And by being a solid, well documented, easy to use product.
- subsection1h 12y ago
  Heroku and Passenger aren't mutually exclusive.[1] Heroku users must choose an app server. Heroku currently recommends Puma,[2] even for apps that aren't thread safe.[3] I don't know why they don't recommended Passenger. [1] https://github.com/phusion/passenger-ruby-heroku-demo https://github.com/phusion/passenger-ruby-heroku-demo [2] https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog-items/594 https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog-items/594 [3] https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/deploying-rails-applications-with-the-puma-web-server#config https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/deploying-rails-applic...
ForHackernews 12y ago
I really like Passenger for my dev servers, because you can easily run both Ruby (Rails) and Python (WSGI) applications under it. I'm not aware of another mainstream app server that offers that flexibility.
- fleetfox 12y ago
  I'm not sure if you can call it mainstream but what about uwsgi?
- bshimmin 12y ago
  And Node.js too.
- mrinterweb 12y ago
  Don't forget that you can also run Node.js apps on Passenger.
berfarah 12y ago
Awesome, looking forward to their docker image with this. Using their images has made my projects a lot easier to bootstrap.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
moe 12y ago
...and it still doesn't log to syslog nor stdout?
fny 12y ago
Is the 4x performance improvement in all the charted benchmarks exclusively an enterprise benefit? It would be really nice to a see comparison including both the open source and enterprise versions.
- FooBarWidget 12y ago
  No, it is in open source. Everything you read about is open source, unless explicitly documented as enterprise only.
  - fny 12y ago
    So what about the hybrid concurrency model--specifically the multithreading, which seems to be enterprise only? Would one expect even higher throughput than what's shown in the charts?
    - FooBarWidget 12y ago
      Multithreading is documented as enterprise only. Whether it helps throughput depends on your app's workload. If your app spends a lot of time waiting on IO, such as the database or external HTTP API calls, then yes it will likely improve throughput. Otherwise it won't improve throughput, though it can reduce memory usage.
- cheald 12y ago
  It's because of Passenger's built-in short-term HTTP cache, which is included in the open-source version. That said, the performance gain from the charts is from caching; it's not going to make your Ruby code run 4x faster. Be sure you read https://blog.phusion.nl/2015/02/09/turbocaching-security-changes/ https://blog.phusion.nl/2015/02/09/turbocaching-security-cha... to make sure you don't accidentally end up serving things from a cache that you intended to not be cached/shared.
kolev 12y ago
Great news, but I'm a bit disappointed that Debian/Ubuntu repo is not available on launch day.
dang 12y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8657982 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8657982

65 points by cmpb 12y ago

pastullo 12y ago

worth upgrading from unicorn for a few thousands visitors per month?

Xorlev 12y ago
Nope. You'll be fine on whatever you're running on. Even Webrick.
- tinco 12y ago
  Just to be clear (not sure if you're kidding) but people use Passenger (and production application servers in general) not just because they meet some minimum throughput threshold. Passenger takes care of keeping your application alive, makes sure slow clients don't break it, automatically handles concurrency and has low latency. That's just the basics, there's a lot of configuration options for the more serious deployments.
  - mahouse 12y ago
    How does Passenger compare to unicorn? (I'm curious)
    - wasd 12y ago
      Passenger and Unicorn (from Passenger): https://github.com/phusion/passenger/wiki/Unicorn-vs-Phusion-Passenger https://github.com/phusion/passenger/wiki/Unicorn-vs-Phusion... Passenger and Puma (from Passenger): https://github.com/phusion/passenger/wiki/Puma-vs-Phusion-Passenger https://github.com/phusion/passenger/wiki/Puma-vs-Phusion-Pa...
  - Xorlev 12y ago
    Sure, but at a few thousand visitors a month that clocks in around one request every 10 minutes or so. I'm not saying they shouldn't use Passenger or another production app server (I use Unicorn fronted by nginx personally), but it'd honestly probably be fine with Webrick. I'm also not saying that Webrick is what they'd want to be on since it doesn't really have any supervision or real smarts.
    - bryanlarsen 12y ago
      With that few requests, the wrong app server will terminate the process, meaning that every request will endure massive startup costs. It also probably means that the server is on a $5 VM, so memory pressure is also a concern.

ohcoder 12y ago

Cool!

fideloper 12y ago

As a (primarily) developer who is also in the DevOps "space", I'm wondering if anyone knows Phusion's usage popularity over "rolling your own" (unicorn) or Paas (Heroku) usage? The enterprise features seem really great, although per server charging is definitely in the Enterprise range of $$$ !

mperham 12y ago
People dramatically underestimate the amount of time necessary to support a complex project like Passenger. Phusion earns every dime of that Enterprise pricing.
WillPostForFood 12y ago
I think they built their popularity by being the first really easy way to use Rails with Apache. And by being a solid, well documented, easy to use product.
subsection1h 12y ago
Heroku and Passenger aren't mutually exclusive.[1] Heroku users must choose an app server. Heroku currently recommends Puma,[2] even for apps that aren't thread safe.[3] I don't know why they don't recommended Passenger. [1] https://github.com/phusion/passenger-ruby-heroku-demo https://github.com/phusion/passenger-ruby-heroku-demo [2] https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog-items/594 https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog-items/594 [3] https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/deploying-rails-applications-with-the-puma-web-server#config https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/deploying-rails-applic...

ForHackernews 12y ago

I really like Passenger for my dev servers, because you can easily run both Ruby (Rails) and Python (WSGI) applications under it. I'm not aware of another mainstream app server that offers that flexibility.

fleetfox 12y ago
I'm not sure if you can call it mainstream but what about uwsgi?
bshimmin 12y ago
And Node.js too.
mrinterweb 12y ago
Don't forget that you can also run Node.js apps on Passenger.

berfarah 12y ago

Awesome, looking forward to their docker image with this. Using their images has made my projects a lot easier to bootstrap.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

moe 12y ago

...and it still doesn't log to syslog nor stdout?

fny 12y ago

Is the 4x performance improvement in all the charted benchmarks exclusively an enterprise benefit? It would be really nice to a see comparison including both the open source and enterprise versions.

FooBarWidget 12y ago
No, it is in open source. Everything you read about is open source, unless explicitly documented as enterprise only.
- fny 12y ago
  So what about the hybrid concurrency model--specifically the multithreading, which seems to be enterprise only? Would one expect even higher throughput than what's shown in the charts?
  - FooBarWidget 12y ago
    Multithreading is documented as enterprise only. Whether it helps throughput depends on your app's workload. If your app spends a lot of time waiting on IO, such as the database or external HTTP API calls, then yes it will likely improve throughput. Otherwise it won't improve throughput, though it can reduce memory usage.
cheald 12y ago
It's because of Passenger's built-in short-term HTTP cache, which is included in the open-source version. That said, the performance gain from the charts is from caching; it's not going to make your Ruby code run 4x faster. Be sure you read https://blog.phusion.nl/2015/02/09/turbocaching-security-changes/ https://blog.phusion.nl/2015/02/09/turbocaching-security-cha... to make sure you don't accidentally end up serving things from a cache that you intended to not be cached/shared.

kolev 12y ago

Great news, but I'm a bit disappointed that Debian/Ubuntu repo is not available on launch day.

dang 12y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8657982 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8657982