What are the benefits of running a app server in user space, like Unicorn, as opposed to as sudo?

Posted by dan on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by dan
Published on 2012-07-03T14:10:43Z Indexed on 2012/07/03 15:17 UTC
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I've been using Phusion Passenger + Rails/Sinatra for a lot of projects. Passenger runs under the main Nginx or Apache process.

But I'm interested in Unicorn, partly because it runs in user space. You just set up Nginx to proxy_pass requests to a unix socket that is connected to Unicorn processes that you fire up under a normal user account.

Is there anything to be said as far as advantages and disadvantages of these two alternative approaches to running an web app? I mean in terms of ease of administration, stability, simplicity, etc.

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