I am running into deployment issues with Phusion Passenger on a fairly large app: stalled processes on high loads, idle processes, slow firing up of an instance, etc. So I was looking into Unicorn, which I like very much from an architecture/performance perspective.
Are there any easy to follow migration guides to go from Nginx Phusion Passenger to Unicorn?
Because newer versions of Rails use Rack under the hood, it should be fairly easy to switch between web servers. When simply starting Unicorn with your application in a development environment, what specific issues are you encountering?
You should be able to keep using Nginx as a reverse proxy. From what I've gathered, Unicorn is supposed to do the load balancing across workers itself, because it only has a single listening socket/port it shares across them. Thus Nginx should normally be configured as a very simple reverse proxy and asset server, without load balancing. (Except, of course, when spreading workers across machines.)
Is there a specific dependence on Passenger within your application that you're hoping to solve? Or are you asking for generic deployment instructions for Unicorn?