Internally, Phusion Passenger spawns multiple Ruby application processes in order to handle requests. But there are multiple ways with which processes can be spawned, each having its own set of pros and cons. Supported spawn methods are: 'smart':: When this spawn method is used, Phusion Passenger will attempt to cache any framework code (e.g. Ruby on Rails itself) and application code for a limited period of time. Please read <> for a more detailed explanation of what smart spawning exactly does. + *Pros:* This can significantly decrease spawn time (by as much as 90%). And, when Ruby Enterprise Edition is used, <>. + *Cons:* Some applications and libraries are not compatible with smart spawning. If that's the case for your application, then you should use 'conservative' as spawning method. Please read <> for possible compatibility issues. 'smart-lv2':: This spawning method is similar to 'smart' but it skips the framework spawner and uses the application spawner directly. This means the framework code is not cached between multiple applications, although it is still cached within instances of the same application. Please read <> for a more detailed explanation of what smart-lv2 spawning exactly does. + *Pros:* It is compatible with a larger number of applications when compared to the 'smart' method, and still performs some caching. + *Cons:* It is slower than smart spawning if you have many applications which use the same framework version. It is therefore advised that shared hosts use the 'smart' method instead. 'conservative':: This spawning method is similar to the one used in Mongrel Cluster. It does not perform any code caching at all. Please read <> for a more detailed explanation of what conservative spawning exactly does. + *Pros:* Conservative spawning is guaranteed to be compatible with all applications and libraries. + *Cons:* Much slower than smart spawning. Every spawn action will be equally slow, though no slower than the startup time of a single server in Mongrel Cluster. Conservative spawning will also render <> useless.