Happy birthday, my beautiful Arch! I've only been a devotee since October, 2010, and I don't know how I got along without it. While others are fighting with old. outdated bugs, I get to fight only the newest, shiniest bugs.
We do a lot of ruby apps, avoiding rails as much as possible, but Redmine is one we use often. In all of our apps we use the Runit process supervisor to launch them, with svlogd logging each individual process. It has proven more than up to the task of keeping up with the busiest of our logging needs, and has many advanced features simply configured that other loggers lack. Worth checking out as an alternative, as you don't have to replace your syslogger to use it. See http://rubyists.github.com/2011/05/02/runit-for-ruby-and-eve... for more info
Problem is the only upstart distribution we tried (with the runit-run package in ubuntu) rendered the system unbootable. This seems to be the case with everything past Karmic.
Thanks for those links, it's good to see others using runit, I'm afraid because if its lack of popularity it's been overlooked as a sysv replacement in favor of systemd, upstart, and others. Runit's maturity should be a big edge, when thinking about a replacement PID 1.