Passenger mod_rails - I'm a believer.
I was initially skeptical of Passenger aka mod_rails (because it seems to good to be true) but tonight I became a believer. We recently finished work on fairly high profile project. The installation seemed to be running fine but after installing monit regular tests revealed mongrel instances were hanging or unresponsive and randomly coming back online. After 3 days of the mysterious mongrel issues, apache tweaking of the proxy config, replacing mod_proxy_balancer with haproxy, and experimenting with other backends like thin and ebb I decided to give Passenger a shot. The gem was super easy and the apache install application was super easy and very helpful. After installing Passenger the new site is rocking. Goodbye mongrel.
