Passenger 2.0.4 Released: Now With Global Queuing and Background Process Support

It's hard to believe that Phusion's Passenger (sometimes known as mod_rails or mod_rack) is only 8 months old, but it's already become the de facto Rails deployment technology. David Heinemeier Hansson was prescient as ever in April when he declared "This could become very popular, very fast!"

Passenger 2.0.4 has just been released - a point release in name, but like most Passenger releases, another feature comes to the fore. The big feature this time around is global queueing. A feature sponsored by 37 Signals, global queueing effectively changes Passenger from deploying requests to back-end processes with their own process queues to a global queue scheme (where processes take requests off the queue). Income requests will now be balanced across the back-end processes so that no processes are running idle while others are struggling. The result is a smoother performance profile and higher reliability overall.

Another new feature (though really a resolved bug) is that you can launch background processes from your Rails application now without making Passenger wait for those background processes to end. There are various other bug and compatibility fixes. Warnings when using the latest versions of Rake and RubyGems have also been cleared up.

Support from: 1st Easy offers UK Rails hosting (dedicated and shared) running Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) and LAMP stack. If you want to get to know us first, or simply want to evaluate the performance of your Rails applications running on Passenger, we'll arrange a trial hosting account for you (full technical support included!)

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