Switching from Pound to Nginx
I just switched some Ruby on Rails apps I’m running from Pound to Nginx based on the results from some articles I’ve read online. The two biggest advantages of Nginx are 1. It’s raw performance, and 2. It can serve up static files, which is great for running Capistrano’s disable_web command to show a maintenance page when redeploying an application.
At work, we’re working on a standard Ruby on Rails setup and are currently investigating two options. The first is a Mongrel cluster running behind Nginx, as I described above. The second option is fronting the Mongrel cluster with Lighttpd. Since the 1.4.x series of Lighttpd is known to have some issues with it’s mod_proxy implementation, we would use Pen until a stable 1.5 version is released.
I’ll post another article once we have finished our evaluation and chosen which option we’re going to deploy at work. Stay tuned…