[jcapote]

Have you tried nginx/passenger? I ask because I wonder how much of that gain is part of switching to nginx rather than switching to unicorn...

[inaka]

on a separate application and server, yes, and it seems faster than apache/passenger, but it still suffers from the 'passenger choke' where touching tmp/restart.txt seems to pause all web traffic for 10-15 seconds, so we never considered it here...