Bernard — I much prefer to have my rails processes sitting behind a setup designed for them. I’m using apache2.2/mod_proxy_balancer/mongrel in one place, apache2/lighttpd in another, and apache2.2/nginx/mongrel in a third.

I’ve not done extensive benchmarking, but those setups feel more responsive than stock apache/fcgi, and I like that I can cleanly restart the rails processes without bringing down the whole web server, particularly in a shared hosting environment where I don’t have control of the front end server.