If you want to set up Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu Lucid from scratch, there are quite some articles online to choose from. I found most of them involve compiling, only highlight 1 aspect, or are a bit outdated.

Gems Mongrel Mysql Nginx Programming Ror Ruby Sqlite Thin Ubuntu

At Transloadit we use HAProxy "The Reliable, High Performance TCP/HTTP Load Balancer" so that we can offer different services on 1 port.

Haproxy Logging Nginx Nodejs Rsyslogd Syslog Transloadit Ubuntu

I still got sites running Apache, but all new projects are launched with Nginx. I don't need many of the features that Apache offers, and the speed gain of Nginx is just tremendous. Once you've experienced it, I doubt you'll...

Apache Cakephp Nginx Performance Php