Recommendations (and Differences) between different Ruby on Rails Production Web Servers

Short answer

Go with Apache/Nginx + Passenger. Passenger is fast, reliable, easy to configure and deploy. Passenger has been adopted by a large number of big Rails applications, including Shopify.

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The long answer

Forget about CGI and FastCGI. In the beginning there were no other alternatives so the only way to run Rails was using CGI or the faster browser FastCGI. Nowadays almost nobody runs Rails under CGI. The latest Rails versions no longer provides .cgi and .fcgi runners.

Mongrel has been a largely adopted solution, the best replacement for CGI and FCGI. Many sites still use Mongrel and Mongrel cluster, however Mongrel project is almost dead and many projects already moved to other solutions (mostly Passenger). Also, a Mongrel based architecture is quite hard to configure because it needs a frontend proxy (thin, ngnix) and a backend architecture composed of multiple Mongrel instances.

Passenger has been gaining widespread attention since it was released. Many projects switched from Mongrel to Passenger for many reasons, including (but not limited to) easy deployment, maintainability and performance. Additionally, Passenger is now available for both Apache and Ngnix.

The simplest way to use Passenger is the Apache + Passenger configuration. One Apache installation and multiple Passenger processes.

If you need better performance and scalability, you can use Ngnix as a frontend proxy and forward all Rails requests to multiple backend servers, each one composed of Apache + Passenger. I'm not going into the technical details here, this solution is intended to be used by Rails projects with an high level of traffic.

Even more complex solutions include a combination of different levels including http proxies and servers. You can have an idea of what I'm talking about reading some internal details from GitHub and Heroku.

Right now, Passenger is the best answer for most Rails projects.

Mongrel and Thin are single ruby process servers that you would run multiple of as a cluster behind some type of proxy (like Apache or Nginx). The proxy would manage which instance of Mongrel or Thin services the requests.

Passenger creates an interface between Apache or Nginx that creates an application spawning process and then forks out processes to server up incoming requests as they come in. There are a lot of configuration options for how long those processes live, how many there can be, and how many requests they will serve before they die. This is by far the most common way to scale up and handle a high traffic application, but it is not without drawbacks. This can only be done on a *nix operating system (linux, mac os x, etc). Also, these processes spin up on demand, so if no one accesses your site for a while, they processes die and the next request has the delay of it starting back up again. With Mongrel and Thin, the process is always running. Sometimes though, your processes being new and fresh can be a good thing for memory usage etc.

If it is going to be a relatively low traffic site, Mongrel or Thin provides a simple, easy to manage way to deploy the application. For higher traffic sites where you need the smart queuing and process management of something like Passenger, it is a very good solution.

As for fastcgi, you probably want to use that as a last option.