I have a pretty simply passenger installation on my production server. It seems that every night the passenger process quits due to inactivity.
When I hit the site in the morning, passenger starts up again and will give me a fairly straightforward error that the 'sinatra' rubygem could not be loaded. When I refresh the page, the problem goes away and passenger works fine for the rest of the day.
Sinatra is a readily available gem, and I load it in after I require 'rubygems.' Any idea why passenger would fail to launch on the first try?
Passenger stays up the whole time, but it'll allow the Rack processes which are the part executing your code to shutdown after a length of inactivity. The simplest solution is to keep at least one Rack process running. Assuming Passenger 3.x you can add this to your vhost or passenger config.