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Cowboy vs Mongoose Web Server vs nginx: What are the differences?
## Introduction
Key differences between Cowboy and Mongoose Web Server and nginx are highlighted below:
1. **Performance**: Cowboy and Mongoose Web Server are designed to handle long-lasting connections efficiently, making them suitable for applications requiring high concurrency. On the other hand, Nginx is known for its efficiency in serving static content and reverse proxy capabilities, making it ideal for caching and load balancing.
2. **Protocol Support**: Cowboy primarily focuses on supporting the HTTP protocol and WebSockets, providing a robust foundation for building modern web applications. In contrast, Nginx supports a wider range of protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, POP3, and IMAP, making it versatile for various networking tasks.
3. **Configuration**: Nginx offers a highly flexible and easy-to-understand configuration file syntax, allowing administrators to customize the server behavior extensively. In comparison, Cowboy and Mongoose Web Server typically require less configuration due to their simpler nature, making them easier to set up for basic use cases.
4. **Use Cases**: Cowboy and Mongoose Web Server are well-suited for applications that require real-time communication or streaming capabilities, as they can efficiently handle continuous connections. Conversely, Nginx excels in scenarios where caching, load balancing, and serving static content are essential, making it a popular choice for web servers.
5. **Community and Ecosystem**: Nginx boasts a large and active community of users and developers, offering a plethora of third-party modules and plugins to extend its functionality. In contrast, Cowboy and Mongoose Web Server have smaller but dedicated communities, focusing on providing lightweight and efficient web server solutions.
6. **Scalability**: When it comes to scalability, Nginx is often preferred for handling high traffic loads and distributing requests across multiple servers or instances due to its robust proxying capabilities and load-balancing algorithms. While Cowboy and Mongoose Web Server can also scale effectively, they are more commonly used in scenarios requiring high concurrency and real-time communication rather than massive scalability requirements.
In Summary, the key differences between Cowboy and Mongoose Web Server and nginx lie in their performance focus, protocol support, configuration options, use cases, community support, and scalability capabilities.
I am diving into web development, both front and back end. I feel comfortable with administration, scripting and moderate coding in bash, Python and C++, but I am also a Windows fan (i love inner conflict). What are the votes on web servers? IIS is expensive and restrictive (has Windows adoption of open source changed this?) Apache has the history but seems to be at the root of most of my Infosec issues, and I know nothing about nginx (is it too new to rely on?). And no, I don't know what I want to do on the web explicitly, but hosting and data storage (both cloud and tape) are possibilities. Ready, aim fire!
I would pick nginx over both IIS and Apace HTTP Server any day. Combine it with docker, and as you grow maybe even traefik, and you'll have a really flexible solution for serving http content where you can take sites and projects up and down without effort, easily move it between systems and dont have to handle any dependencies on your actual local machine.
From a StackShare Community member: "We are a LAMP shop currently focused on improving web performance for our customers. We have made many front-end optimizations and now we are considering replacing Apache with nginx. I was wondering if others saw a noticeable performance gain or any other benefits by switching."
I use nginx because it is very light weight. Where Apache tries to include everything in the web server, nginx opts to have external programs/facilities take care of that so the web server can focus on efficiently serving web pages. While this can seem inefficient, it limits the number of new bugs found in the web server, which is the element that faces the client most directly.
I use nginx because its more flexible and easy to configure
I use Apache HTTP Server because it's intuitive, comprehensive, well-documented, and just works
For us, NGINX is a lite HTTP server easy to configure. On our research, we found a well-documented software we a lot of support from the community.
We have been using it alongside tools like certbot and it has been a total success.
We can easily configure our sites and have a folder for available vs enabled sites, and with the nginx -t command we can easily check everything is running fine.
- Server rendered HTML output from PHP is being migrated to the client as Vue.js components, future plans to provide additional content, and other new miscellaneous features all result in a substantial increase of static files needing to be served from the server. NGINX has better performance than Apache for serving static content.
- The change to NGINX will require switching from PHP to PHP-FPM resulting in a distributed architecture with a higher complexity configuration, but this is outweighed by PHP-FPM being faster than PHP for processing requests.
- The NGINX + PHP-FPM setup now allows for horizontally scaling of resources rather vertically scaling the previously combined Apache + PHP resources.
- PHP shell tasks can now efficiently be decoupled from the application reducing main application footprint and allow for scaling of tasks on an individual basis.
Pros of Cowboy
- Websockets integration8
- Cool name6
- Good to use with Erlang3
- Anime mascot2
Pros of Mongoose Web Server
- Light weight1
- Easy to configure1
- Web server1
Pros of NGINX
- High-performance http server1.4K
- Performance894
- Easy to configure730
- Open source607
- Load balancer530
- Free289
- Scalability288
- Web server226
- Simplicity175
- Easy setup136
- Content caching30
- Web Accelerator21
- Capability15
- Fast14
- High-latency12
- Predictability12
- Reverse Proxy8
- The best of them7
- Supports http/27
- Great Community5
- Lots of Modules5
- Enterprise version5
- High perfomance proxy server4
- Embedded Lua scripting3
- Streaming media delivery3
- Streaming media3
- Reversy Proxy3
- Blash2
- GRPC-Web2
- Lightweight2
- Fast and easy to set up2
- Slim2
- saltstack2
- Virtual hosting1
- Narrow focus. Easy to configure. Fast1
- Along with Redis Cache its the Most superior1
- Ingress controller1
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Cons of Cowboy
Cons of Mongoose Web Server
Cons of NGINX
- Advanced features require subscription10