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Gunicorn vs nginx: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will discuss the key differences between Gunicorn and Nginx, two popular web servers commonly used in web development.

  1. Concurrency Model: One of the major differences between Gunicorn and Nginx is their concurrency models. Gunicorn follows the Asynchronous Worker Model, where each request is handled by a separate worker process that runs concurrently. This allows Gunicorn to handle multiple requests simultaneously, providing high parallelism. On the other hand, Nginx uses an Event-Driven Model, where a single master process handles all the incoming requests asynchronously. It achieves high concurrency by utilizing non-blocking I/O operations and event notification mechanisms.

  2. Primary Functionality: Gunicorn primarily serves as a Python web server gateway interface (WSGI), providing a way to serve Python web applications. It translates requests received by the web server into a format that is understood by Python applications and vice versa. On the other hand, Nginx is a powerful web server and reverse proxy server that can handle various protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, POP3, and IMAP. It is often used as a front-end proxy for load balancing and serving static content, while also capable of passing requests to backend servers.

  3. Configuration: Gunicorn's configuration is typically done using command-line arguments or a configuration file. It allows fine-grained control over the number of workers, timeout settings, logging, and other parameters. Nginx, on the other hand, uses a declarative configuration language that is often written in the nginx.conf file. The configuration is more extensive and flexible, allowing customization at various levels, including server blocks, location blocks, and SSL settings. It also supports dynamic reconfiguration without restarting the server.

  4. SSL/TLS Termination: Nginx has built-in support for SSL/TLS termination, which means it can handle secure HTTPS connections directly. It can handle SSL certificate management, encryption, and decryption of traffic, offloading these tasks from backend servers. In contrast, Gunicorn does not provide SSL/TLS termination out of the box. If SSL/TLS termination is required for a Gunicorn-powered website, it is common to use Nginx as a reverse proxy in front of Gunicorn, offloading the SSL/TLS tasks to Nginx.

  5. Load Balancing: Nginx serves as a capable load balancer that can distribute incoming traffic evenly among multiple backend servers, improving performance and fault tolerance. It supports various load balancing algorithms, such as round-robin, least connections, and IP hashing. Gunicorn, on the other hand, is not designed to be used as a standalone load balancer. It focuses on handling Python WSGI requests and should typically be used behind a load balancer like Nginx to take advantage of load balancing functionalities.

  6. Server-level Caching: Nginx provides built-in server-level caching capabilities that allow it to cache static content or even the responses from dynamic applications. This caching can significantly improve the overall performance and reduce the load on backend servers. Gunicorn does not provide such caching features by default. However, Gunicorn can be used with external caching solutions like Varnish or Nginx's own caching proxy module to achieve similar caching functionality.

In summary, Gunicorn and Nginx have distinct roles in web development. Gunicorn specializes in running Python web applications using the WSGI specification, while Nginx excels as a full-fledged web server, reverse proxy, load balancer, and caching server. The choice between Gunicorn and Nginx depends on the specific requirements of the web application or infrastructure setup.

Advice on Gunicorn and NGINX

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 · 723.5K views
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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
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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)
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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
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I use nginx because its more flexible and easy to configure

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Christian Cwienk
Software Developer at SAP · | 1 upvotes · 689.2K views
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I use Apache HTTP Server because it's intuitive, comprehensive, well-documented, and just works

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Decisions about Gunicorn and NGINX
Daniel Calvo
Co-Founder at Polpo Data Analytics & Software Development · | 8 upvotes · 271.6K 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 Gunicorn
Pros of NGINX
  • 34
    Python
  • 30
    Easy setup
  • 8
    Reliable
  • 3
    Light
  • 3
    Fast
  • 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
    Supports http/2
  • 7
    The best of them
  • 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

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Cons of Gunicorn
Cons of NGINX
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    What is Gunicorn?

    Gunicorn is a pre-fork worker model ported from Ruby's Unicorn project. The Gunicorn server is broadly compatible with various web frameworks, simply implemented, light on server resources, and fairly speedy.

    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.

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    Blog Posts

    What are some alternatives to Gunicorn and NGINX?
    uWSGI
    The uWSGI project aims at developing a full stack for building hosting services.
    Flask
    Flask is intended for getting started very quickly and was developed with best intentions in mind.
    Waitress
    It is meant to be a production-quality pure-Python WSGI server with very acceptable performance. It has no dependencies except ones which live in the Python standard library. It runs on CPython on Unix and Windows under Python 2.7+ and Python 3.4+. It is also known to run on PyPy 1.6.0 on UNIX.
    gevent
    It is a coroutine -based Python networking library that uses greenlet to provide a high-level synchronous API on top of the libev or libuv event loop.
    Apache HTTP Server
    The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.
    See all alternatives