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Over the weekend I moved some of my rails applications to yet another rails deployment option (See my previous posts on deploying rails with apache, mongrel and mod_proxy_balancer or pound, lighttptd and mongrel).

I replaced apache with nginx, a small fast webserver with good proxying and rewriting capabilities. Nginx is extremely fast, a lot easier to configure than apache and uses much less memory. The process was remarkably painless.

I got a new 1GB slicehost vps yesterday. Up to now my preferred rails deployment was to use pound to proxy dynamic requests to a cluster of mongrels and static requests to lighttpd. Previously I had used lighttpd with fast-cgi but since mongrel was released I have avoided fast-cgi solutions. I also played around with using nginx with mongrel. For my new vps I decided to move from my previous deployment configuration of pound, lighttpd and mongrel to apache 2.2 with mod_proxy_balance and mongrel.

This article describes how to configure pound to use lighttpd to serve the static parts of your rails application and mongrel to serve your dynamic content.