Hi Myles. It’s good to know that we’ve caught Sitepoint’s attention. Passenger was written with shared hosts in mind. I’d like to let you know that we’re going to publish a series of articles about memory usage and startup time in Rails, and what Passenger does about that in order to make Rails more suitable for shared hosts. We think that you might be interested that, so please keep an eye on our blog for updates. :)

@madpilot, @jdl:
It’s not “it’s coming”. Actually, it won’t be “it’s coming” for a long time. We have no plans to support Windows for the forseeable future. This is not because we’re ***holes who want to screw over Windows users, but because Windows lacks the infrastructure and capabilities to implement Passenger efficiently.

Admittedly, the model modrails uses is probably closer to the ASP.NET Application Pool model - there is a live rails process always running.

I was referring to this article.

php_impact: I disagree. Ignore the fact that PHP is a language and Rails is a framework for a moment (remember that mod_rails only works with Rails, not general Ruby making it a fair comparison), how is PHP any more web-centric than Rails?

Rails has been designed to make building database-driven web applications, and now with mod_rails it is as easy to deploy as PHP is. I think this is very significant step towards Rails becoming a mature platform.

“PHP is optimized to that environment. By contrast Perl, Python and Ruby are general purpose languages and optimized to different requirements. The web is just another platform they support, compared to PHP where the web is the primary platform.”

Learn more about the execution model. With a good execution model, your can develop large-scale applications.