To be fair, fastcgi wasn't /too/ bad IF you actually had it running well at least once g and that varied incredibly from machine to machine, alas. It did use a similar underlying mechanism to most of these other alternatives, just in a rather messy way.

I don't think SwitchPipe will rule anything, but perhaps once it's up on Github (instead of SVN) and I release the next version, more baby steps can be made. I'd love to make it even more simple somehow, and perhaps port it to a much faster base (probably Python).

Yeah, I've had good luck with mod_fcgid, actually. I don't have that much traffic, but I like the fact that the software takes care of setting up and tearing down new instances of the application server, rather than having to take a wild guess at how many mongrel instances might be needed per virtual host. This is something that mod_rails also promises to do well.

fair enough :)