So here’s my problem. I’ve written an RoR application and I’ve managed to get a server up and running with Apache and Passenger. Im paying quite a bit for my server, but I have no idea if my application is effectively using the server’s resources. How do I gather metrics to make sure that I can configure my web server(Apache) and application server (Passenger) optimally to serve my application?
I realized that there are 3 parts in the answer to this question. First, we need to understand how Apache and Passenger are designed to handle incoming HTTP requests together. Second, we need to understand what the various directives available for Apache and Passenger mean. And finally, we need to see how we can gather metrics and tweak these directives to the optimal setting.
Im going to address each of these 3 parts in 3 blog posts. So lets get started with the first, how Apache and Passenger are setup to work together.
There is an explanation in the Passenger docs on Passenger’s Architecture but frankly, I could not digest it in one read. So I’m going to summarize it for our purposes here.
mod_passenger sits in the control process and every child process of Apache's
