Version 5.3.6 of the Passenger application server for Ruby, Node.js, Meteor and Python has been released. Most notably in this release is the smart spawning fix.

Fixes smart spawning

A regression in Passenger 5.3.5, introduced during a refactoring effort, made it so that Passenger only used the direct spawning method. This issue was mostly noticeable in the form of increased process spawning times between v5.3.4 and v5.3.5.

This is now fixed.

Various improvements & fixes

  • Fixes Passenger Core and application processes staying on the Watchdog's OOM score (unkillable). Closes GH-2105.
  • Fixes mach_vm_map failed warnings on macOS >= High Sierra. These warnings were harmless, but annoying. Closes GH-2101.
  • Fixes passenger-config compile-agent compilation with optimizations. The optimization flags were not properly passed to the compiler.
  • Fixes a crash that could occur when HTTP clients send a chunked transfer-encoding body containing a chunk larger than 429496729 bytes.
  • Improves detection of the system Apache's include headers on macOS High Sierra and later.
  • Fixes RVM gemset detection on RVM 1.29.
  • No longer supplies precompiled Ruby extensions for Ruby 1.9.3 and 2.0.0. When running Ruby 1.9.3 and 2.0.0, Passenger will attempt to compile from source instead.

What's next?

The next release candidate will most certainly change the minimum supported macOS version to 10.11 El Capitan. In our recent livestream we've also revealed what's coming up in the next major version upgrade, Passenger 6.

Installing 5.3.6

Besides support for the latest software (Nginx stable, Ubuntu), the 5.3 series of Passenger features per-application logfiles. There has been a lot of work on the internals to enable vastly improved error reporting.

The 5.x series of Passenger in general brings a plethora of improvements in uptime maximization, security and efficiency. Please see the installation guide.

Upgrading to 5.3.6

We strongly advise staying up to date with the latest version.

Check out our upgrade guides for the different platforms:

If you are upgrading from 4.x, please read the 5.0 upgrade notes to learn about potential upgrade caveats.

Please be aware that you can enjoy enterprise features and sponsor the open source development directly by buying Phusion Passenger Enterprise.