[gamache]

Passenger is a big win. I once ran nginx + mongrel_cluster, and while it probably had less overhead than the equivalent Apache + Passenger setup, it was more than cancelled out by the effort necessary to babysit the mongrel processes. This was also more of an issue with MRI-era Ruby and its associated memory leaks.

With Passenger, I set it and forget it. Time is money.

[zealog]

I agree.

I've been using NGinx/Mongrel for most of my large deployed apps, but am working to get things moved to Passenger (and Apache, natch), simply for the ability to do a graceful restart on most code changes. For large apps, the ever expanding mongrel footprint and slow restarts is becoming too much to bear.

So for me, Nginx has a lot to offer over Apache, but with the rails deployments I've been working on mostly, it's no longer enough.