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Unicorn vs nginx: What are the differences?

Introduction

Unicorn and nginx are both popular web server software that have their own distinct features and functionalities. While they are both designed to serve web applications, there are key differences between the two.

  1. Scalability: Unicorn is best suited for applications that are designed to handle many concurrent requests at a time. It uses a "one process per request" model, which means that it spawns a new worker process to handle each incoming request. This allows Unicorn to handle a large number of concurrent connections efficiently. On the other hand, nginx is known for its high scalability and performance. It uses an event-driven architecture and can handle thousands of concurrent connections with ease.

  2. Load Balancing: Unicorn does not have built-in load balancing capabilities. It is typically used with a reverse proxy server like nginx or HAProxy to distribute incoming requests among multiple Unicorn instances. Nginx, on the other hand, comes with built-in load balancing features. It can distribute incoming requests among multiple backend servers based on various algorithms like round robin, IP hash, etc.

  3. Websockets Support: Unicorn does not natively support Websockets, which are used for real-time communication between a client and a server. It is not designed to handle long-lived connections and does not provide the necessary functionality for implementing Websockets. Nginx, on the other hand, provides full support for Websockets and can handle the bidirectional communication required for real-time applications.

  4. Static File Serving: Nginx is known for its efficient handling of static files. It is often used as a reverse proxy server or a front-end proxy server to serve static files directly from disk. It can also cache static files in memory, resulting in improved performance and reduced load on the backend application servers. Unicorn, on the other hand, is primarily designed to handle dynamic requests and is not as efficient at serving static files.

  5. Configuration: Unicorn is a Ruby application server and is typically configured using Ruby code. It requires a separate configuration file and does not have a built-in configuration interface. Nginx, on the other hand, uses a declarative configuration syntax that is easy to understand and modify. It provides a variety of configuration options and can be customized to meet specific requirements without requiring any coding.

  6. SSL/TLS Support: Nginx has extensive support for SSL/TLS protocols and can handle encrypted connections with ease. It can be easily configured to use SSL certificates, enable HTTPS, and enforce HTTPS redirection. Unicorn, on the other hand, does not have built-in SSL/TLS support. It relies on a reverse proxy server like nginx or HAProxy to handle SSL/TLS termination.

In Summary, Unicorn is a Ruby application server that is well-suited for applications requiring high concurrency, while nginx is a powerful web server known for its scalability, load balancing capabilities, Websockets support, efficient static file serving, easy configuration, and extensive SSL/TLS support.

Advice on NGINX and Unicorn
Mark Ndungu
Software Developer at Nouveta · | 4 upvotes · 30.9K views
Needs advice
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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
on
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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I am diving into web development, both front and back end. I feel comfortable with administration, scripting and moderate coding in bash, Python and C++, but I am also a Windows fan (i love inner conflict). What are the votes on web servers? IIS is expensive and restrictive (has Windows adoption of open source changed this?) Apache has the history but seems to be at the root of most of my Infosec issues, and I know nothing about nginx (is it too new to rely on?). And no, I don't know what I want to do on the web explicitly, but hosting and data storage (both cloud and tape) are possibilities. Ready, aim fire!

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Replies (1)
Simon Aronsson
Developer Advocate at k6 / Load Impact · | 4 upvotes · 716.4K views
Recommends
on
NGINXNGINX

I would pick nginx over both IIS and Apace HTTP Server any day. Combine it with docker, and as you grow maybe even traefik, and you'll have a really flexible solution for serving http content where you can take sites and projects up and down without effort, easily move it between systems and dont have to handle any dependencies on your actual local machine.

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Needs advice
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Apache HTTP ServerApache HTTP Server
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NGINXNGINX

From a StackShare Community member: "We are a LAMP shop currently focused on improving web performance for our customers. We have made many front-end optimizations and now we are considering replacing Apache with nginx. I was wondering if others saw a noticeable performance gain or any other benefits by switching."

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Replies (3)
Recommends
on
NGINXNGINX

I use nginx because it is very light weight. Where Apache tries to include everything in the web server, nginx opts to have external programs/facilities take care of that so the web server can focus on efficiently serving web pages. While this can seem inefficient, it limits the number of new bugs found in the web server, which is the element that faces the client most directly.

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Leandro Barral
Recommends
on
NGINXNGINX

I use nginx because its more flexible and easy to configure

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Christian Cwienk
Software Developer at SAP · | 1 upvotes · 682.5K views
Recommends
on
Apache HTTP ServerApache HTTP Server

I use Apache HTTP Server because it's intuitive, comprehensive, well-documented, and just works

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Decisions about NGINX and Unicorn
Daniel Calvo
Co-Founder at Polpo Data Analytics & Software Development · | 8 upvotes · 268.5K views

For us, NGINX is a lite HTTP server easy to configure. On our research, we found a well-documented software we a lot of support from the community.

We have been using it alongside tools like certbot and it has been a total success.

We can easily configure our sites and have a folder for available vs enabled sites, and with the nginx -t command we can easily check everything is running fine.

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Grant Steuart
  • Server rendered HTML output from PHP is being migrated to the client as Vue.js components, future plans to provide additional content, and other new miscellaneous features all result in a substantial increase of static files needing to be served from the server. NGINX has better performance than Apache for serving static content.
  • The change to NGINX will require switching from PHP to PHP-FPM resulting in a distributed architecture with a higher complexity configuration, but this is outweighed by PHP-FPM being faster than PHP for processing requests.
  • The NGINX + PHP-FPM setup now allows for horizontally scaling of resources rather vertically scaling the previously combined Apache + PHP resources.
  • PHP shell tasks can now efficiently be decoupled from the application reducing main application footprint and allow for scaling of tasks on an individual basis.
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Pros of NGINX
Pros of Unicorn
  • 1.4K
    High-performance http server
  • 894
    Performance
  • 730
    Easy to configure
  • 607
    Open source
  • 530
    Load balancer
  • 289
    Free
  • 288
    Scalability
  • 226
    Web server
  • 175
    Simplicity
  • 136
    Easy setup
  • 30
    Content caching
  • 21
    Web Accelerator
  • 15
    Capability
  • 14
    Fast
  • 12
    High-latency
  • 12
    Predictability
  • 8
    Reverse Proxy
  • 7
    The best of them
  • 7
    Supports http/2
  • 5
    Great Community
  • 5
    Lots of Modules
  • 5
    Enterprise version
  • 4
    High perfomance proxy server
  • 3
    Embedded Lua scripting
  • 3
    Streaming media delivery
  • 3
    Streaming media
  • 3
    Reversy Proxy
  • 2
    Blash
  • 2
    GRPC-Web
  • 2
    Lightweight
  • 2
    Fast and easy to set up
  • 2
    Slim
  • 2
    saltstack
  • 1
    Virtual hosting
  • 1
    Narrow focus. Easy to configure. Fast
  • 1
    Along with Redis Cache its the Most superior
  • 1
    Ingress controller
  • 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 NGINX
Cons of Unicorn
  • 10
    Advanced features require subscription
  • 4
    Not multithreaded

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What is 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.

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.

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    Blog Posts

    What are some alternatives to NGINX and Unicorn?
    HAProxy
    HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) is a free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications.
    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.
    Traefik
    A modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying microservices easy. Traefik integrates with your existing infrastructure components and configures itself automatically and dynamically.
    Caddy
    Caddy 2 is a powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS written in Go.
    Envoy
    Originally built at Lyft, Envoy is a high performance C++ distributed proxy designed for single services and applications, as well as a communication bus and “universal data plane” designed for large microservice “service mesh” architectures.
    See all alternatives