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Gunicorn vs Unicorn: What are the differences?
Gunicorn and Unicorn are both popular web servers used for hosting and serving web applications. Let's explore the key differences between them.
Concurrency Model: Gunicorn uses a pre-fork worker model, where it creates multiple worker processes upfront and distributes incoming requests among them. On the other hand, Unicorn follows a single-threaded model and uses a master process to manage worker processes, allowing for more efficient memory usage.
Programming Language Support: Gunicorn primarily focuses on supporting Python applications and is specifically designed for running Python web frameworks like Django or Flask. Unicorn, on the other hand, is a Ruby web server and is optimized for hosting Ruby on Rails applications.
Load Balancing: Gunicorn does not include built-in load balancing capabilities but can be combined with external load balancers such as NGINX to distribute the incoming requests. In contrast, Unicorn includes built-in load balancing, allowing it to handle multiple concurrent requests and distribute them among worker processes efficiently.
Performance and Scalability: Gunicorn is known for its performance and scalability, making it a suitable choice for high-traffic websites or applications. However, Unicorn is considered to have better performance compared to Gunicorn when it comes to handling concurrent connections and long-polling scenarios.
Configuration and Customizability: Gunicorn provides more advanced configuration options and allows fine-grained control over worker processes, timeouts, logging, and other server settings. On the other hand, Unicorn follows a convention-over-configuration approach and provides fewer configuration options, focusing on simplicity and ease of use.
Community Support and Ecosystem: Both Gunicorn and Unicorn have active communities and are widely used in their respective programming language ecosystems. However, Gunicorn's community support and ecosystem are broader and more established due to its popularity among Python developers.
In summary, Gunicorn and Unicorn are both HTTP servers for Python web applications, with Gunicorn being more commonly used in production environments due to its scalability and compatibility with various Python web frameworks. Unicorn, on the other hand, is known for its simplicity and ease of use, making it popular for development and testing purposes.
I have an integration service that pulls data from third party systems saves it and returns it to the user of the service. We can pull large data sets with the service and response JSON can go up to 5MB with gzip compression. I currently use Rails 6 and Ruby 2.7.2 and Puma web server. Slow clients tend to prevent other users from accessing the system. Am considering a switch to Unicorn.
Consider trying to use puma workers first. puma -w basically. That will launch multiple puma processes to manage the requests, like unicorn, but also run threads within those processes. You can turn the number of workers and number of threads to find the right memory footprint / request per second balance.
Pros of Gunicorn
- Python34
- Easy setup30
- Reliable8
- Light3
- Fast3
Pros of Unicorn
- Fast81
- Performance59
- Web server36
- Very light30
- Open Source30
- Rack http server27
- Load balancing18
- Great process management14
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Cons of Gunicorn
Cons of Unicorn
- Not multithreaded4
