I usually try to avoid hitting the brake as much as possible in order to maintain the most uniform speed I can. This is due to a selfish, lazy motivation, because I don't want to rapidly alternate between gas and brake.
I think there is also a psychological component to seeing bright red brake lights. I want to say it creates a reactive, and often overly reactive response. I imagine lifting a foot off the gas pedal often creates sufficient deceleration without the alarm caused by hitting the brake pedal but many people don't drive this way. Maybe we should have two shades, or colors, or a full gradient to indicate level of braking? What if a brake light could indicate current speed?
I ditched ColdFusion for Ruby as my go to language years ago. Rather than reiterate the overwhelming negative aspects of ColdFusion, I suggest you spend a bit more time with Ruby, Python, and other languages; don't be constrained by one.
I had issues with passenger at an event where a couple thousand people were relying on my app (about 1 thousand concurrent). I had a single dual quad machine running a rails 3-pre app on ruby 1.9, which was mem leaking every 30-45 min and melting down the goods. On site, I switched from nginx + passenger to apache + passenger so I could use a max-requests-per-worker type directive (only available with apache + nginx), which didn't solve my problems. I made one more leap (on the spot) to nginx + unicorn, and problem solved. It also saved me at least 1gb of normal operational ram.
I still think passenger is great for low demand sites. It took a while to figure out everything that had to be done for unicorn, which included a proper unicorn config file, a rake task to start/stop/restart, and a matching init.d script for my ubuntu; I also wrote a rake task to install the init.d script. Someone should post that stuff online.
I think there is also a psychological component to seeing bright red brake lights. I want to say it creates a reactive, and often overly reactive response. I imagine lifting a foot off the gas pedal often creates sufficient deceleration without the alarm caused by hitting the brake pedal but many people don't drive this way. Maybe we should have two shades, or colors, or a full gradient to indicate level of braking? What if a brake light could indicate current speed?