Significance of /dev/null in Web Servers?

Recently I've heard a bit about the implementation (or rather, use of) /dev/null in Mongrel2, as well as other projects. However, I've never seen it explained what this actually means.

What does this mean开发者_运维知识库, and why is it good for scalability (as I've seen it be claimed)?

Please read this :-) The Mongrel2 "support" was a joke (see the change, which was later removed).

Being serious though, /dev/null is useful when you want to discard output from processes. You can redirect output to it, for example, and the kernel will just discard that output.

/dev/null is a virtual device on UNIX systems which basically drops all data sent to it.