Redmine

If instructions are thin, it's because they're sufficient.

1. Your choice. Personnally I prefer thin, then mongrel, then mod-ruby. So just stay with mongrel. Thin performs better, but frankly, I doubt you'll hit their limits with redmine. There's no funny port, only funny admins. Reverse_proxy exists to deal with them.
2. F*ck mongrel version. Use rubygem for mongrel/thin/what else.
3. You're totally mess between app server and web server. Webrick mongrel thin etc. are app server (ruby server to tell the truth), they can serve static content as Apache but since that's not their job, they do it slowly.
4. No
5. It does and seem to like it.

Thanks for the info. I'm clear about the app server vs the app, but there are no docs about configuring servers to serve Redmine. So my question #3 was if the docs for mongrel etc. are sufficient to get redmine served up. By comparison, the Trac site has info about serving trac with fastcgi, mod-python, or mod-wsgi.

I'll have to submit a feature request for #4 if it doesn't already exist.

According to the official Ruby on Rails documentation the preferred method for a production Environment is using Mongrel with Apache as a proxy balancer. The installation instructions for Redmine using WEBrick should only be used for testing or development.

Last time I checked mod-ruby was an abandoned project. It was replaced by another project that is still being developed, mod-rails.

I used this guide and everything has been working perfectly: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=674598&highlight=redmine.

Thanks, that Ubuntu guide looks very helpful (ignoring a few silly things like including all apache2 mods).

Although I really dislike resorting to language specific repositories (cpan, pypi, gems). I'd much rather configure and update my entire machine with apt-get. I'll check versions and get as much as possible from ubuntu packages. Or are there known problems with the stock debian/ubuntu packages?

yes, there are.

with unbuntu 8.04 you'll get rubygems version 1.1.1 wich has some seroius problems with memory-management. I'd suggest to install rubygems from an downloaded tat.gz from http://www.rubygems.org/, like version 1.3.x

cheers
markus

Will rubygems effect the running perf (or memory use) of Redmine? I assumed "gems" where just for packaging and installation that wouldn't have much impact at runtime. In other words, if I can get everything installed does it matter if rubygems uses too much memory. Or is there a daemon that leaks memory?

yeah, you're right. it only matters ast install time, afaik.
but i think at some point you need to get back to gem install <> and this brought some problems to me...