High performance Ruby server – Raptor Passenger 5

If you’re a Ruby developer, it probably didn’t escape your attention that Phusion have announced a radical update to their awesome Ruby application server – Passenger.

Codenamed Raptor, this new server boasts performance up to 4x faster than Unicorn, and even up to 2x faster than Puma!

This blistering performance comes thanks to an integrated HTTP cache called turbocache. Like Jelastic itself, turbocache does not ask you to use Phusion Passenger-specific APIs to take advantage of it. Just set your standard HTTP response headers properly and Phusion Passenger’s turbocache does the rest.

An independent test showed that Raptor can comfortably exceed 6 million requests per hour serving a typical app. What’s even more exciting is this is possible with a relatively modest app server footprint – Raptor won’t eat your server for breakfast. In Jelastic terms, thanks to its automatic vertical resource scaling, that equates to direct cost savings to run your Ruby app.

We’ve hooked up the latest (beta2) build of Passenger 5 for you to test out on our Jelastic platform, configured in Standalone server mode – so you get the full taste of the performance benefits. Since this is just a beta please don’t use it in production yet – but let us know your results! If it proves popular we’ll happy to build the next beta release as soon as it drops…

Just enter your email address to try it out:

PS If you want to run your own load tests, keep in mind that the shared resolver has concurrency limits – you will only get meaningful results with a public IP (paid accounts only).