The Avid Mind

Currently on one of the servers where we deploy rails, we use the Apache + Nginx + Mongrel setup, primarily for the following reasons :

1. The Server has apache 1.3 already, and it’s really a pain to try updating it since it’s all tied up to cpanel
2. Apache 1.3 proxying doesn’t support the ! directive, which basically is the strategy for skipping static images
3. Because of the reason above, we use mongrel both for clustering and static file sending support.
4. Mongrel, for obvious reasons, best of which is ease of use and deployment.

Now I’m thinking of just Apache + Mongrel, with no send file support. Basically the setup will rely on using rails’ asset host feature. Will post back if this works.

Also, im thinking of using pen as a load balancer, for ease of use and simplicity of getting it up and running (nginx config is a pain compared to pen)