I finally tried out Passenger (mod_rails) and Ruby Enterprise Edition. Two words come to mind: easy and awesome!

For those of you that don't know, Passenger is an apache module that makes Ruby on Rails deployment super easy in the same way that deploying php can be super easy. You simply point apache at the public directory of your Rails application and you're good to go. Ruby Enterprise Edition is written by the same folks as Passenger and it improves Ruby's garbage collector and memory allocator. They claim that with Ruby Enterprise Edition your Rails apps will use 33% less memory.

I highly recommend checking it out.