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Cowboy vs Passenger vs nginx: What are the differences?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
Pros of Passenger
- Nginx integration43
- Great for rails36
- Fast web server21
- Free19
- Lightweight15
- Scalable14
- Rolling restarts13
- Multithreading10
- Out-of-process architecture9
- Low-bandwidth6
- Virtually infinitely scalable2
- Deployment error resistance2
- Mass deployment2
- High-latency2
- Many of its good features are only enterprise level1
- Apache integration1
- Secure1
- Asynchronous I/O1
- Multiple programming language support1
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Cons of Cowboy
Cons of NGINX
- Advanced features require subscription10
Cons of Passenger
- Cost (some features require paid/pro)0