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Cowboy

669
72
+ 1
19
NGINX

113.3K
60.9K
+ 1
5.5K
Passenger

1.4K
298
+ 1
199

Cowboy vs Passenger vs nginx: What are the differences?

  1. Scalability: Cowboy is more suited for applications that require real-time features due to its efficient handling of long-lived connections, making it scalable for chat applications and streaming services. Passenger and Nginx, on the other hand, are better suited for serving static content and handling a large number of concurrent connections.

  2. Configuration: Cowboy requires Erlang/OTP knowledge for advanced configuration and customization, making it more complicated for beginners. In contrast, Passenger and Nginx have user-friendly configuration files that are easier to understand and manage, especially for those with limited technical expertise.

  3. Request Processing: Cowboy processes HTTP requests within the Erlang VM, which can affect performance when handling high concurrency. Passenger and Nginx, on the other hand, offload processing to separate worker processes or threads, improving overall request handling efficiency and scalability under heavy loads.

  4. Web Server Functionality: Cowboy is a standalone HTTP server, which means it can handle HTTP requests directly without the need for additional server software. Passenger and Nginx, on the other hand, are primarily used as reverse proxy servers, forwarding requests to backend application servers like Ruby on Rails or Django.

  5. Ease of Deployment: Cowboy requires specific dependencies and configurations, making it less straightforward to deploy compared to Passenger and Nginx, which have simpler installation processes and are commonly supported by hosting providers for easy deployment of web applications.

  6. Community Support: Nginx has a large and active open-source community that regularly contributes updates, plugins, and support, ensuring continuous improvements and a wealth of resources for troubleshooting and optimization. Cowboy and Passenger have smaller communities by comparison, which may result in less robust support and fewer available resources for users.

In Summary, each web server (Cowboy, Passenger, Nginx) has its strengths and weaknesses, with Cowboy excelling in real-time features, Passenger and Nginx being more user-friendly for beginners, and Nginx having excellent community support.

Advice on Cowboy, NGINX, and Passenger

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!

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Replies (1)
Simon Aronsson
Developer Advocate at k6 / Load Impact · | 4 upvotes · 717.2K views
Recommends
on
NGINXNGINX

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.

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Needs advice
on
Apache HTTP ServerApache HTTP Server
and
NGINXNGINX

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."

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Replies (3)
Recommends
on
NGINXNGINX

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.

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Leandro Barral
Recommends
on
NGINXNGINX

I use nginx because its more flexible and easy to configure

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Christian Cwienk
Software Developer at SAP · | 1 upvotes · 683.3K views
Recommends
on
Apache HTTP ServerApache HTTP Server

I use Apache HTTP Server because it's intuitive, comprehensive, well-documented, and just works

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Decisions about Cowboy, NGINX, and Passenger
Daniel Calvo
Co-Founder at Polpo Data Analytics & Software Development · | 8 upvotes · 268.9K views

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.

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Grant Steuart
  • 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.
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Pros of Cowboy
Pros of NGINX
Pros of Passenger
  • 8
    Websockets integration
  • 6
    Cool name
  • 3
    Good to use with Erlang
  • 2
    Anime mascot
  • 1.4K
    High-performance http server
  • 894
    Performance
  • 730
    Easy to configure
  • 607
    Open source
  • 530
    Load balancer
  • 289
    Free
  • 288
    Scalability
  • 226
    Web server
  • 175
    Simplicity
  • 136
    Easy setup
  • 30
    Content caching
  • 21
    Web Accelerator
  • 15
    Capability
  • 14
    Fast
  • 12
    High-latency
  • 12
    Predictability
  • 8
    Reverse Proxy
  • 7
    The best of them
  • 7
    Supports http/2
  • 5
    Great Community
  • 5
    Lots of Modules
  • 5
    Enterprise version
  • 4
    High perfomance proxy server
  • 3
    Embedded Lua scripting
  • 3
    Streaming media delivery
  • 3
    Streaming media
  • 3
    Reversy Proxy
  • 2
    Blash
  • 2
    GRPC-Web
  • 2
    Lightweight
  • 2
    Fast and easy to set up
  • 2
    Slim
  • 2
    saltstack
  • 1
    Virtual hosting
  • 1
    Narrow focus. Easy to configure. Fast
  • 1
    Along with Redis Cache its the Most superior
  • 1
    Ingress controller
  • 43
    Nginx integration
  • 36
    Great for rails
  • 21
    Fast web server
  • 19
    Free
  • 15
    Lightweight
  • 14
    Scalable
  • 13
    Rolling restarts
  • 10
    Multithreading
  • 9
    Out-of-process architecture
  • 6
    Low-bandwidth
  • 2
    Virtually infinitely scalable
  • 2
    Deployment error resistance
  • 2
    Mass deployment
  • 2
    High-latency
  • 1
    Many of its good features are only enterprise level
  • 1
    Apache integration
  • 1
    Secure
  • 1
    Asynchronous I/O
  • 1
    Multiple programming language support

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Cons of Cowboy
Cons of NGINX
Cons of Passenger
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 10
      Advanced features require subscription
    • 0
      Cost (some features require paid/pro)

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    What is Cowboy?

    Cowboy aims to provide a complete HTTP stack in a small code base. It is optimized for low latency and low memory usage, in part because it uses binary strings. Cowboy provides routing capabilities, selectively dispatching requests to handlers written in Erlang.

    What is NGINX?

    nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.

    What is Passenger?

    Phusion Passenger is a web server and application server, designed to be fast, robust and lightweight. It takes a lot of complexity out of deploying web apps, adds powerful enterprise-grade features that are useful in production, and makes administration much easier and less complex.

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    What tools integrate with Cowboy?
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      What are some alternatives to Cowboy, NGINX, and Passenger?
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      Amazon EC2
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      Amazon Web Services (AWS)
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      Heroku
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