With the rocket rise of Mongrel, we’ve seen a growing number of folks jump ship from lighttpd to Apache 2.2 because of mod_proxy_balancer. It’s great to see that Mongrel is putting Apache back on the map as a premiere Rails web server, but unless you desire Apache for other reasons, you certainly don’t have to jump ship.

The trouble with lighttpd is the state of its mod_proxy implementation, which leaves a lot to be desired when used as a balancer between multiple Mongrel backends. But because the whole Rails deployment stack is going straight HTTP, it’s surprisingly easy to rectify. All you need is to add a more capable load balancer to the mix and you’re golden.

One such balancer that has seen a lot of play lately is Pound (OS X install notes). It’s light, fast, and proven on mega sites. So here’s what you do if want to stay with lighttpd and still use Mongrel:

• Setup lighttpd on port 80 with mod_proxy to point at one back-end server (see the Mongrel lighty docs, but just only use one backend instead of four).
• Setup Pound on a high port, like 7999, and make it point to any number of Mongrel processes (see the Mongrel Pound docs).
• Start n number of Mongrels, from say port 8000 through 8002, using either mongrel_cluster or the soon-to-be-committed Mongrel-compatible script/process/spawner

And bingo, you should now have a production-ready stack ready to take on the world. This is a pretty good outline of how we at 37signals intend to use Mongrel in production shortly.

You can also take pleasure in the fact that Jan Knesche is busy at work making the Pound crutch unnecessary. Over the Summer, he has promised to elevate mod_proxy to be on par with the competition, and this three-way stack should again become a two-way one.