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Lwan vs Unicorn: What are the differences?
What is Lwan? Experimental, scalable, high performance HTTP server. In development for almost 3 years, Lwan was until now a personal research effort that focused mostly on building a solid infrastructure for a lightweight and speedy web server.
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.
Lwan and Unicorn can be categorized as "Web Servers" tools.
Lwan and Unicorn are both open source tools. It seems that Lwan with 5.01K GitHub stars and 524 forks on GitHub has more adoption than Unicorn with 1.35K GitHub stars and 249 GitHub forks.
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 Lwan
- C and Lua Scripting1
- Free1
- High-performance http server1
- Performance1
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 Lwan
Cons of Unicorn
- Not multithreaded4
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What is Lwan?
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