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Passenger has really become the gold standard in easy deployment of Ruby on Rails apps. It’s amazing simple to configure and quite efficient. In addition to the installation tool, there are a couple small analysis/maintenance tools that are included for giving you some insight into how Passenger is running on your system. You don’t hear much talk about them and I quickly overlooked them at first.

passenger-memory-stats

This tool allows you to see a display of the real-time memory usage for Passenger and Apache.

passenger-status

This tool shows you what your current passenger stats are and what apps are currently running.

You can read more about both of these in the Passenger documention.

I do a fair amount of work pseudo-streaming video using the flv_streaming module in Lighttpd. However, it’s a bit of a pain to use Lighttpd for Streaming and apache for content serving. You either have to run the two on separate servers or use a non-standard port for Lighttpd. But that seems to be changing. I have come across a couple pseudo-streaming modules for Apache. One if for streaming FLV and the other is for streaming H264. Here’s some info on using both:

mod_flvx: http://flowplayer.org/forum/5/14679

mod_h264: http://h264.code-shop.com/trac/wiki/Mod-H264-Streaming-Apache-Version2

I have compiled the mod_flvx into Apache, but I have yet to try it out in production. I am excited about the h.264 streaming. My biggest complaint with using FLV files converted with ffmpeg is the low quality compared to vp6 encoded FLV files. ffmpeg doesn’t support vp6 given that it’s a commercial codec. But  h.264 is comparable in quality to vp6, making it an attractive alternative.