There seems to be a lot of speculation in this thread about software you don’t understand.
It’s reminiscent of the “Rails can’t scale” trolling that has been refuted time and again.
One day the client suddenly dropped on us that he wanted to deploy to a windows server.
How odd! I haven’t had any experience developing or deploying rails on Windows and don’t think I ever will.
I will share a secret with you, people use Macs to make web sites, Linux to run them and Windows to test them in Internet Explorer. Now that’s trolling.
Seriously though, I don’t know anyone who would choose to deploy Rails apps to a Windows server. Just don’t.
I’ve never had to configure servers other than a dev machine myself so I can’t comment on the specifics, all I know is that popular Rails architectures can scale perfectly fine for the vast majority of websites. If you get to the size of a Facebook or a Twitter you’re always going to need something special.
More generally, it seems we’ve been moving toward a more diverse server architecture than in the days of the xAMP stack.
It’s common for web servers to be running many processes like Ruby, Python, a Javascript runtime, Memcache/Redis, Solr/Sphinx etc…