Phusion Blog

2.0.3 is a minor release containing non-intrusive bug fixes and optimizations.

Changes

Vendor Rails optimization

Some people vendorize Ruby on Rails. In previous versions, Phusion Passenger creates a new framework spawner which caches the code for the vendorized Rails framework. This step has now been removed because it’s redundant. As a result, Phusion Passenger now uses less memory when serving applications that have vendorized Rails. It is therefore especially adviced that shared hosts upgrade to this version.

‘passenger-memory-stats’ now works on non-Linux systems

The ‘passenger-memory-stats’ didn’t work correctly on non-Linux platforms. This has been fixed. However, ‘passenger-memory-stats’ is only capable of displaying the real memory usage of processes when running on Linux. Other operating systems don’t provide a way to query the real memory usage, unfortunately. So on non-Linux platforms, ‘passenger-memory-stats’ will display the Resident Set Size instead.

WSGI fixes

WSGI support in Phusion Passenger is mostly a proof of concept. Nevertheless, we find it worthwhile to fix any WSGI-related bugs that we may encounter. 2.0.3 fixes Python 2.4 compatibility (previous versions require at least Python 2.5), and fixes some WSGI compliance bugs. Thanks to Weyert de Boer for contributing the latter fix.

How do I upgrade to 2.0.3?

Via a gem

Please install it with the following command:

gem install passenger

Next, run:

passenger-install-apache2-module

Please don’t forget to copy & paste the Apache config snippet that the installer gives you.

Via a native Linux package

Neil Wilson from Brightbox has kindly provided an Ubuntu 8.04 package for Phusion Passenger. The package is available from the Brightbox repository which you can find at:

http://apt.brightbox.net

Add the following line to the Third Party Software Sources:

deb http://apt.brightbox.net hardy main

(The simplest way to do that is to create a file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ containing the deb instruction, and then run ‘apt-get update‘).

Once you’ve done this then you can install Phusion Passenger by running:

apt-get install libapache2-mod-passenger

(Note that Neil is currently packaging 2.0.3, so it might take a while before this release shows up in the apt repository.)