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lighttpd

148
134
+ 1
27
Unicorn

494
399
+ 1
295
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lighttpd vs Unicorn: What are the differences?

What is lighttpd? A secure, fast, compliant, and very flexible web-server that has been optimized for high-performance environments. 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.

What is Unicorn? Rack HTTP server for fast clients and Unix. 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.

lighttpd and Unicorn belong to "Web Servers" category of the tech stack.

"Lightweight" is the primary reason why developers consider lighttpd over the competitors, whereas "Fast" was stated as the key factor in picking Unicorn.

Unicorn is an open source tool with 1.35K GitHub stars and 249 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Unicorn's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, Unicorn has a broader approval, being mentioned in 176 company stacks & 55 developers stacks; compared to lighttpd, which is listed in 15 company stacks and 4 developer stacks.

Advice on lighttpd and Unicorn
Mark Ndungu
Software Developer at Nouveta · | 4 upvotes · 30K views
Needs advice
on
PumaPuma
and
UnicornUnicorn

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.

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Replies (1)
Recommends
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PumaPuma

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.

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Pros of lighttpd
Pros of Unicorn
  • 7
    Lightweight
  • 6
    Easy setup
  • 2
    Simplicity
  • 2
    Full featured
  • 2
    Proxy
  • 2
    Virtal hosting
  • 2
    Open source
  • 1
    Available modules
  • 1
    Fast
  • 1
    Security
  • 1
    Ssl support
  • 81
    Fast
  • 59
    Performance
  • 36
    Web server
  • 30
    Very light
  • 30
    Open Source
  • 27
    Rack http server
  • 18
    Load balancing
  • 14
    Great process management

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Cons of lighttpd
Cons of Unicorn
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 4
      Not multithreaded

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    - No public GitHub repository available -

    What is 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.

    What is 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.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    Jobs that mention lighttpd and Unicorn as a desired skillset
    What companies use lighttpd?
    What companies use Unicorn?
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    What tools integrate with lighttpd?
    What tools integrate with Unicorn?
      No integrations found

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      What are some alternatives to lighttpd and Unicorn?
      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.
      LiteSpeed
      It is a drop-in Apache replacement and the leading high-performance, high-scalability server. You can replace your existing Apache server with it without changing your configuration or operating system details. As a drop-in replacement, it allows you to quickly eliminate Apache bottlenecks in 15 minutes with zero downtime.
      Caddy
      Caddy 2 is a powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS written in Go.
      JavaScript
      JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.
      Git
      Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
      See all alternatives