Apache Passenger with Rails 3 Environment

You can configure how many Rails processes Apache/passenger spawns. For your size (3 concurrent requests) you should be fine with 2 rails processes:

Set these in your apache config:

PassengerMaxPoolSize 2
PassengerMaxInstancesPerApp 2

The MaxPoolSize determines how many instances can be started maximally, the MaxInstancesPerApp determines how many instances each web-app can have.

You might want to play with:

PassengerPoolIdleTime 

to specify how many seconds an instance must be idle before it is unloaded. Default is 300 seconds.

I run pretty high traffic web application with 3 instances without any problems.

Oh and - the Ruby Enterprise Edition helps too.

Problem was a school boy mod_rewrite error - in order for the RewriteRule to be run both the RewriteCond statements above need to be satisfied, which of course they never will be. This was my fault for copying this from a negative condition test and not realising they would have to be separated. Although annoying that I need two RewriteRule statements, this works perfectly:

  RewriteCond /home/user/public_html%{REQUEST_URI} -f
  RewriteRule ^ /home/user/public_html%{REQUEST_URI} [L]
  RewriteCond /home/user/public_html%{REQUEST_URI} -d
  RewriteRule ^ /home/user/public_html%{REQUEST_URI} [L]