Puma vs lighttpd

Overview

Puma

Stacks1.2K

Followers265

Votes20

GitHub Stars7.8K

Forks1.5K

lighttpd

Stacks156

Followers133

Votes27

Puma vs lighttpd: What are the differences?

Introduction

In web development, choosing the right web server is crucial to achieving optimal performance. Puma and lighttpd are two popular web servers that each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Understanding the key differences between them can help developers make an informed decision on which to use for their projects.

Performance: Puma is known for its multi-threading capabilities, allowing it to handle a high volume of requests efficiently by utilizing all available CPU cores. On the other hand, lighttpd is known for its speed and low memory footprint, making it a better choice for serving static files or handling a large number of concurrent connections without consuming too many system resources.
Configuration: Puma is typically used with Ruby on Rails applications and can be easily configured through the Rails application configuration files. In contrast, lighttpd has a more complex configuration setup that is done through its configuration file, making it less user-friendly for beginners but more customizable for advanced users looking to fine-tune their server settings.
Flexibility: Puma is specifically designed to work well with Ruby applications and is commonly used in Ruby on Rails deployments. On the other hand, lighttpd is a more general-purpose web server that can be used with a wider variety of programming languages and frameworks, making it a versatile choice for different types of projects.
Logging and Monitoring: Puma provides detailed logging capabilities that allow developers to monitor and analyze server performance and troubleshoot issues effectively. Lighttpd also offers logging functionality but may require additional tools or configurations to achieve the same level of detailed monitoring as Puma.
Community Support: Puma has a strong community of Ruby on Rails developers who actively contribute to its development and provide support through forums, documentation, and online resources. Lighttpd also has a dedicated user base, but it may not have as extensive community support as Puma, particularly in the context of Ruby on Rails.
Security Features: Lighttpd is known for its robust security features, including support for SSL/TLS encryption, chroot() function to sandbox processes, and various security modules that can enhance server security. Puma, while not lacking in security features, may not have the same level of out-of-the-box security configurations as lighttpd.

In Summary, understanding the key differences between Puma and lighttpd, such as performance, configuration, flexibility, logging and monitoring, community support, and security features, can help developers make an informed decision on which web server to use for their specific web development projects.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Puma, lighttpd

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.

38.5k views38.5k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Puma	lighttpd
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.	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.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 7.8K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 1.5K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 1.2K	Stacks 156
Followers 265	Followers 133
Votes 20	Votes 27
Pros & Cons
Pros 4 Free 3 Convenient 3 Easy 2 Default Rails server 2 Consumes less memory than Unicorn Cons 0 Uses `select` (limited client count)	Pros 7 Lightweight 6 Easy setup 2 Virtal hosting 2 Simplicity 2 Full featured

What are some alternatives to Puma, lighttpd?

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.

Unicorn

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Caddy

Caddy 2 is a powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS written in Go.

Related Comparisons

Puma vs lighttpd: What are the differences?

Introduction

Performance: Puma is known for its multi-threading capabilities, allowing it to handle a high volume of requests efficiently by utilizing all available CPU cores. On the other hand, lighttpd is known for its speed and low memory footprint, making it a better choice for serving static files or handling a large number of concurrent connections without consuming too many system resources.
Configuration: Puma is typically used with Ruby on Rails applications and can be easily configured through the Rails application configuration files. In contrast, lighttpd has a more complex configuration setup that is done through its configuration file, making it less user-friendly for beginners but more customizable for advanced users looking to fine-tune their server settings.
Flexibility: Puma is specifically designed to work well with Ruby applications and is commonly used in Ruby on Rails deployments. On the other hand, lighttpd is a more general-purpose web server that can be used with a wider variety of programming languages and frameworks, making it a versatile choice for different types of projects.
Logging and Monitoring: Puma provides detailed logging capabilities that allow developers to monitor and analyze server performance and troubleshoot issues effectively. Lighttpd also offers logging functionality but may require additional tools or configurations to achieve the same level of detailed monitoring as Puma.
Community Support: Puma has a strong community of Ruby on Rails developers who actively contribute to its development and provide support through forums, documentation, and online resources. Lighttpd also has a dedicated user base, but it may not have as extensive community support as Puma, particularly in the context of Ruby on Rails.
Security Features: Lighttpd is known for its robust security features, including support for SSL/TLS encryption, chroot() function to sandbox processes, and various security modules that can enhance server security. Puma, while not lacking in security features, may not have the same level of out-of-the-box security configurations as lighttpd.

Puma vs lighttpd

Overview

Puma vs lighttpd: What are the differences?