> if I install Passanger to be able to run Rails apps on on Nginx, are these benefits lost?
No. but you will see the benefits only at a high req/min, because with Apache it would have to spawn new threads to deal with so many requests, taking up memory and other resources, while nginx just sends the requests directly to the passenger instances as needed. basically nginx would use less memory.
> What exact is Passanger?
passenger is a module that understands and handles rails requests. So when a request comes in to nginx for an image, css or other static asset, nginx will find it and send it back, when the request is for a rails controller/action, then it will send it to a passenger instance to process and then return the results to you
No. but you will see the benefits only at a high req/min, because with Apache it would have to spawn new threads to deal with so many requests, taking up memory and other resources, while nginx just sends the requests directly to the passenger instances as needed. basically nginx would use less memory.
> What exact is Passanger? passenger is a module that understands and handles rails requests. So when a request comes in to nginx for an image, css or other static asset, nginx will find it and send it back, when the request is for a rails controller/action, then it will send it to a passenger instance to process and then return the results to you
hope that helps