[drbawb]

I can _personally_ attest that it runs on SuSE (SLES), Debian, Arch, Fedora, [and Ubuntu].

I have no idea what this team was trying to do, but I imagine there _had_ to be more than what they wrote in this gist. That, or they simply ran out of money to troubleshoot the issue further.

There are also many different ways you can run Rails apps. They could've tried to run them on varoius Rack compatible application servers (Passenger on Apache or Nginx, Thin or Unicorn, et al.) -- If they migrated backwards to Rails 2, they could've used an [obsolete] version of Passenger with Ruby 1.8.7-Enterprise, which had many speed and stability improvements. (Assuming their app wasn't 1.9.x compatible.)

tl;dr: There has to be more to the story than this, they had so many options. For a $100,000 investment in administration, I'd have trouble believing they _didn't_ explore other options.