Problem: my assets:precompile was overloading memory and being killed. This caused my deploy process to fail. More than half of my memory is free on my production machine, so what the hell? Turns out assets:precompile starts up 3 instances of your app just to precompile assets! What is absurd, Trebek?
Solution: precompile assets locally, then deploy them. I wrote a quickie capistrano script to do that:
Then, just drop this guy in at the end of your deploy file:
before 'deploy:finalize_update', 'deploy:upload_assets'
Fastest, easiest way to pre-compile and deploy assets.