Overview

Unicorn

Stacks497

Followers401

Votes295

GitHub Stars1.5K

Forks269

Gunicorn

Stacks1.1K

Followers908

Votes78

GitHub Stars10.3K

Forks1.8K

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.

Advice on Unicorn, Gunicorn

Mark

Software Developer at Nouveta

Mar 4, 2022

Needs adviceon

Rails

Ruby

Puma

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.

38.4k views38.4k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Unicorn	Gunicorn
Unicorn is an HTTP server for Rack applications designed to only serve fast clients on low-latency, high-bandwidth connections and take advantage of features in Unix/Unix-like kernels. Slow clients should only be served by placing a reverse proxy capable of fully buffering both the the request and response in between Unicorn and slow clients.	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.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 1.5K	GitHub Stars 10.3K
GitHub Forks 269	GitHub Forks 1.8K
Stacks 497	Stacks 1.1K
Followers 401	Followers 908
Votes 295	Votes 78
Pros & Cons
Pros 81 Fast 59 Performance 36 Web server 30 Very light 30 Open Source Cons 4 Not multithreaded	Pros 34 Python 30 Easy setup 8 Reliable 3 Light 3 Fast

What are some alternatives to Unicorn, Gunicorn?

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.

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.

Microsoft IIS

Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server is a flexible, secure and manageable Web server for hosting anything on the Web. From media streaming to web applications, IIS's scalable and open architecture is ready to handle the most demanding tasks.

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.

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.

Jetty

Jetty is used in a wide variety of projects and products, both in development and production. Jetty can be easily embedded in devices, tools, frameworks, application servers, and clusters. See the Jetty Powered page for more uses of Jetty.

lighttpd

lighttpd has a very low memory footprint compared to other webservers and takes care of cpu-load. Its advanced feature-set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) make lighttpd the perfect webserver-software for every server that suffers load problems.

Swoole

It is an open source high-performance network framework using an event-driven, asynchronous, non-blocking I/O model which makes it scalable and efficient.

Puma

Unlike other Ruby Webservers, Puma was built for speed and parallelism. Puma is a small library that provides a very fast and concurrent HTTP 1.1 server for Ruby web applications.