passenger 5 performance compared to unicorn/thin/puma/etc

Question

I've been searching around for performance tests on the new passenger 5 as I read here it became way faster.

I tried to find other ressources confirming this but no luck. Has anyone tried to install it and see the difference?

Answer 1

Passenger 5 scores better on custom-picked benchmarks because it has a built-in caching layer ("turbocaching") that can avoid actually running your application code for identical requests in a short timeframe; it will not make your actual application code run any faster. This caching layer is only active in certain constrained situations, and is not likely to provide much benefit in the vast majority of actual cases. If you aren't careful, the caching layer may actually end up breaking your application - I demonstrated several security vulnerabilities due to the caching layer to Phusion during the 5 beta phase (which they fixed, at the cost of the caching layer not being able to cache nearly as much). IMO, the Raptor/Passenger 5 benchmarks are deceptive marketing fluff, and the caching layer exists primarily to win Hello World benchmarks, and you should probably just ignore them.

That said, the speed of your application server is almost certainly insignificant in the scope of your overall application performance. Passenger is a great platform because it's extremely user-friendly, well-documented, has an absolutely fantastic installer, and handles a lot of the annoying crap for you out of the box. You should use Passenger if you need the functionality it provides and don't want to screw around with a ton of config stuff. If it doesn't fit your use case, use something else that does.

If every last microsecond is of prime concern to you, you should measure your application's performance under various webservers and various workloads, and then pick the one that performs the best. Otherwise, use whatever you like the most and then switch once performance becomes an actual problem.

Footnote: If you do use Passenger 5, be sure to read the Turbocaching security changes article to be sure you don't accidentally make your application vulnerable to user data theft (or otherwise introduce bugs) through the turbocaching layer.