There are easily half a dozen of factors you need to consider when picking an app server: the choice of the VM, implementation model, performance and memory usage, driver and library availability, community support, and so forth. In other words, it is a complex set of requirements, and no one solution is likely to meet all of them. Not surprisingly, the Ruby ecosystem alone offers a variety of choices where Mongrel, Passenger, Unicorn, and Thin are some of the most popular – each has its own set of advantages and its own set of tradeoffs.At PostRank, weighing our own set of requirements, we chose an event-driven architecture with MRI Ruby + EventMachine as our primary runtime. In the process, we have iterated on several versions of our own web-stack, and arrived at a model which has been a rock solid performer: a fully asynchronous server powered by Ruby 1.9, with a Fiber context for each request. Today, we are releasing Goliath http://goliath.io to the public!

via Goliath: Non-blocking, Ruby 1.9 Web Server – igvita.com.