someone really had to write this up? watch the screencast, it's pretty simple.

also, why "on Slicehost" instead of "on a VPS"? Still don't understand why people are so loyal to Slicehost. Linode ftw.

Screencasts take a lot of time to watch and, most importantly, they aren't google-searchable. Tags aren't enough.

In general, video sucks as a medium for surprising number of applications. I rarely bother with it - when I stumble across one while looking for something, I always move on to the next search result.

When I was transitioning from Windows development over to Linux world, I was lucky to have guys like this one, posting "obvious" things on their blogs: it's indispensable when searching for a specific error message you got in your terminal.

linode ftl. their site is down. http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/linode.com

edit: now it's up

Inserting a big chunk of C++ into my Apache listeners doesn't give me warm fuzzy feelings. Neither does the fact that mod_rails just flat-out doesn't work on OS X, which is where a large number of Rails developers do most of their actual, y'know, development.

Personally, I don't think you can really call this a 1.0 release. Pre-beta preview, maybe; stable, point-oh release, definitely not.

"Inserting a big chunk of C++ into my Apache listeners doesn't give me warm fuzzy feelings."

Uhm, what language do you think all the Apache modules (mod_rewrite, mod_perl, mod_php, etc.) are written in? They're all either C or C++, so by your logic all of Apache won't give you warm fuzzy feelings.

"Neither does the fact that mod_rails just flat-out doesn't work on OS X,"

This is false. Passenger does work on OS X, but because of an issue in the default Apache installation provided by OS X, Passenger is unable to work. If one installs Apache via MacPorts (or some other means) then Passenger will work just fine. In fact, the installer warns the user about exactly this issue.

Many, many people have tested Passenger on OS X, and it works fine for them. Ryan Bates of Railscasts, the one who made the screencast, used OS X. Pratik Naik, a Ruby on Rails core developer who helped with testing Passenger, used OS X.

Haven't tried mod_rails yet, but have had a challenging time deploying rails apps in general

For those that feel the same way I really recommend Rails Machine. Obviously getting something like mod_rails working on Amazon EC2 would give us scalability, but had to put that on the back burner for now.

Have you considered EC2-on-Rails? I tried it last week. Works like a charm exactly as advertised.

http://ec2onrails.rubyforge.org/

Yes - an ec2 image with mod_rails installed would be even better than a screencast.

Has anyone figured out how much less memory mod_rails uses than say Mongrel? I haven't gotten round to experimenting with it myself yet.

It uses more.

It isn't quite as simple as that. After idling some time, it will release memory that Mongrel wouldn't release. There are many topics about the exact details. Future versions will feature more memory optimizations.

so many choices with Rails...does anybody have any experience with mod_rails?

mod_rails was released only this week. I expect to see a lot of experiences in the coming weeks. I'm curious too.