Mongrel2 is still beta, but with a good process supervisor, it still way more robust than a RoR setup from the early days. Once in a while, it can die, I still need to instrument a bit more to track the conditions where this is the case.
On the other hand, ZMQ for the backend is just a pure pleasure and I haven't had a single failure of my components for more than 1 million real requests involving many ZMQ backend interactions.