I'm always happy to get free performance improvements, so it looks like a job well done. However, they note that "It’s not very useful to benchmark Phusion Passenger performance using a Rails application because most of the time is spent in Rails and the application itself." - which I would take to mean that in real world usage, this improvement really isn't going to buy me much. Still, nice work, and thank you!
this improvement really isn't going to buy me much
I think what they were saying is that they wanted to benchtest raw Passenger performance instead of Rails performance. Your Rails app will almost certainly see some benefit from Passenger 3, but they didn't want to distort their testing by throwing Rails into the mix. Makes sense to me.
That they wanted to benchmark their own stuff rather than Rails is blatantly obvious.
My point is that if, in my Rails app, 5% of the time is taken up by Passenger in a typical request, even big improvements like these are just not going to mean much in the real world.
Perhaps they can shed some light on what real world percentages of request time for Passenger vs Rails+App might look like.
Well the thing is there is no such thing as a single "real world percentage". If you want to know what the percentage is for you, you should benchmark it yourself.
A Hello World page would give a good lower bound for Rails' part of things, I think... Beyond that, it's only going to take up more of the total, right?
