The Phusion team keeps blazing ahead with Passenger and improving it rapidly. They’ve just released version 2.0.5, which includes a few fixes and introduces compatibility with the Rack-based Edge Rails.
At 37signals, we’ve already switched over Ta-da List and are busy working on getting the rest of our suite running on Passenger. It’s just so much easier to deal with and the memory savings you get through REE are a nice cherry on top.
I keep getting a steady stream of success reports from all over the world as well. I’ve even read of a few people getting back into Rails development because Passenger finally took out the inconvenience of deploying.
It’s hard to argue with the usability. I’ve personally been setting up a new server running Ubuntu 8.10 and using Apache 2 with Passenger. The time it took me to go from a fresh install to a complete production setup was ridiculously low. There’s just so much less to worry about.
If you haven’t given Passenger a chance yet, now is definitely the time.