The problem wasn't ruby 1.9, but ruby 1.9.1 specifically. I upgraded ruby to 1.9.2 and the stability issues went away. On 1.9.1 the server would randomly hang a

The problem wasn't ruby 1.9, but ruby 1.9.1 specifically. I upgraded ruby to 1.9.2 and the stability issues went away. On 1.9.1 the server would randomly hang and require a kill -9+manual restart.