As a happy and satisfied Passenger Enterprise user, I'd say that Passenger does deserve a better attention from ruby community.
Just because it's (too) easy to use, doesn't mean it can't perform well.<p>We still use version 4 and benchmark it with unicorn and the likes, and we found no noticeable different on performance, except the fact that it's easier to configure and manage.
We've been using Passenger at RailsMachine.com since they released it, and have always been impressed with the team and the performance of the product (across hundreds of customer applications on thousands of app servers) over the years.<p>I had been following Raptor and actually had no idea it was by the Phusion folks. Guess I didn't pay close enough attention! Very excited to test the betas and see how it performs across our network.<p>In benchmarks with customer's systems against Passenger4, Puma, and Unicorn, we have not seen anything that would suggest a general-case migration to any of those would be advisable for apps without a specific workload reason.<p>We have a number of folks on the Enterprise product, primarily for zero downtime restarts. I think "Immutable Infrastructure" plus load balancer support would negate the need for this, if you've got the orchestration in place. I'm curious how Phusion responds to that becoming more and more popular/prevalent.
I just installed this to our test server and impressed by results actually<p>We had 100 req/sec on our 2gb test server.<p>We got 170 req/sec without any tuning by using the same config<p>Im sure i can tune it little more to get it to 200 req/sec, which is a lot improvement to previous version. Well done guys!
I'm a little disappointed. Not that it was a marketing stunt, that was clear from the outset, and it worked well.<p>I'm disappointed they're dropping the Raptor name, it just sounds so much better than "Phusion Passenger".
I am glad this wasn't just a vapourware. Given that it's an improved Passenger, I can believe all the hype.<p>[edit]
Actually trying it out on my dev machine right now. I am getting a random error that I normally don't get with thin server. Doesn't play well with pry either right now. I'll wait a bit until it goes out of beta.
I'm always disappointed when an open source-ish tool has to market itself. Unicorn didn't market itself. Its users marketed Unicorn because it worked/works so well.<p>I also don't think the comparisons Raptor is doing are fair. You're comparing an application server with a cache against just application servers. Also, I would expect Raptor's memory usage to be higher once that cache starts to fill up, or maybe you've created a super small cache just for "Hello World" apps.<p>People aren't avoiding Passenger because "it's too easy to use", a lot of people avoid Passenger because you're a weird company. Application servers are very important, perhaps too important to be tied to a commercial entity.<p>I applaud you on the work (code-wise) you've put into this and I hope the entire Ruby community as a whole benefits from it, like you claim we have with older versions of Passenger (which kinda seems like revisionist history to me, but oh well).
What I liked about Passenger from the get-go is that it figures out how many instances to keep active, given some initial parameters and how much traffic you're getting. That is <i>so</i> much more right than what others were doing back then, which was just starting N instances and hoping N was a good number.
I'm really disappointed zero downtime restarts are still an enterprise only feature.<p>I absolutely cannot justify spending $30/server month on passenger - that's more than the boxes I'm running it on cost - and zero downtime restarts are a must-have for me.
ah-ha! it was Phusion all along. very clever marketing efforts. I wish they could have traded on just the facts, but it's clear they got more buzz taking this path.<p>Kudos to them!