I'm not sure why they think "assload of processes + proxy" is so good either, but deploying an assload of mongrels behind the "pound" load balancer is damn easy. Plus, pound is light-weight, fast, and designed to be small so that it can be easily security audited.

All you have to do is install pound, edit the pound config file to tell it how many mongrels you have and what port range they live at (easy), do a "gem install mongrel_cluster", then a "mongrel_rails cluster::configure" and a "mongrel_rails cluster::start".

I know this sounds like a lot of steps, but if you've ever built and configured apache from source you know this is cake in comparison.