defunkt

That's all true, but dotjs is only for Google Chrome on OS X.

Google Chrome on OS X has no such filesystem-based model for managing scripts.

Chrome extensions can't access the local filesystem so we have to start a tiny webserver in the background.

If someone knows a way around this limitation, or a simpler webserver to require / embed, I would be thrilled. But so far this is the best I've found.

GitHub now owns the octocat art.

Sorry about that. It should show up in 'germany' and some others now, like 'rails' in the first search field and 'europe' in the second (location).

I want to do all of this stuff. Great post.

If each Unicorn worker listened on a different port, we'd have to use one of nginx's load balancing strategies (unless I'm misreading your comment).

We have not had success with them in the past which is why we employed HAProxy with mongrel.

Also it doubles as documentation for the members of our team who aren't familiar with this part of the system :)

nginx relies heavily on system calls at the expense of portability.

Counter example: nginx, which uses fork(), and seems to smoke Apache while offering features like binary reloading without dropping connections (not sure if Apache supports this but I seem to remember no - please correct me if I'm wrong).

Portability is not always necessary - when talking about fork() and friends you're talking about trade offs.

When I'm only ever deploying to Unix environments, I accept the lack of portability in exchange for features I value.

But if you're already taking that memory hit with separate processes, ala mongrel cluster, fork() still provides a number of juicy advantages (which the article explains).