What are the major gotchas and tricks when running Rails on a small slice (256MB)? What is the best server setup for cramped quarters? Passenger, Nginx, Mongrel? What is the best background task processor in this kind of environment? What do you need to watch out for? I'd love to hear the stories of people who have done this and bumped into some of the virtual walls.
4 Answers
I'm running Passenger on a 256mb slicehost, no problems. Much, much, much easier to set up than any other alternative. For background stuff I use Starling and Workling and Ryan Bates has an excellent screencast on how to use both together.

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1Passenger really should be your first choice. – Mike Breen Jan 15 '09 at 20:54
Nginx proxying for a couple of mongrels. Updating gems can cause you to run out of memory, but this can be solved by downloading and compiling rubygems from source. You will have no problem using cron for background tasks as it is very lightweight.

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what if your tasks are activerecord and rails dependent and need to run often? I did come across this re: gem updates: http://groups.google.com/group/emm-ruby/browse_thread/thread/a5c46bf4753f15ee?pli=1 – srboisvert Jan 10 '09 at 12:31
On my 256 slice I run nginx in front of a pair of thin servers. Whatever you decide to go with make sure you're using god or monit to keep your stack in check.

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I suggest Passenger for it's simplicity and smallish footprint. I have that on my VPS with several domains (256MB VPS on RailsPlayground) and no problems so far. Also, the Starling/Workling combination works pretty well or you could even just use the spawn plugin if your site isn't huge (it's dead simple).

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