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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Platform as a Service
  4. Web Servers
  5. Cowboy vs Puma

Cowboy vs Puma

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Puma
Puma
Stacks1.2K
Followers265
Votes20
GitHub Stars7.8K
Forks1.5K
Cowboy
Cowboy
Stacks711
Followers72
Votes19
GitHub Stars7.4K
Forks1.2K

Cowboy vs Puma: What are the differences?

Cowboy: Small, fast, modular HTTP server written in Erlang. Cowboy aims to provide a complete HTTP stack in a small code base. It is optimized for low latency and low memory usage, in part because it uses binary strings. Cowboy provides routing capabilities, selectively dispatching requests to handlers written in Erlang; Puma: A Modern, Concurrent Web Server for Ruby. 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.

Cowboy and Puma can be primarily classified as "Web Servers" tools.

"Websockets integration" is the top reason why over 6 developers like Cowboy, while over 2 developers mention "Easy" as the leading cause for choosing Puma.

Cowboy and Puma are both open source tools. Puma with 5.78K GitHub stars and 987 forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Cowboy with 5.59K GitHub stars and 999 GitHub forks.

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Advice on Puma, Cowboy

Mark
Mark

Software Developer at Nouveta

Mar 4, 2022

Needs adviceonRailsRailsRubyRubyPumaPuma

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
Puma
Cowboy
Cowboy

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.

Cowboy aims to provide a complete HTTP stack in a small code base. It is optimized for low latency and low memory usage, in part because it uses binary strings. Cowboy provides routing capabilities, selectively dispatching requests to handlers written in Erlang.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
7.8K
GitHub Stars
7.4K
GitHub Forks
1.5K
GitHub Forks
1.2K
Stacks
1.2K
Stacks
711
Followers
265
Followers
72
Votes
20
Votes
19
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 4
    Free
  • 3
    Easy
  • 3
    Convenient
  • 2
    Default Rails server
  • 2
    Multithreaded
Cons
  • 0
    Uses `select` (limited client count)
Pros
  • 8
    Websockets integration
  • 6
    Cool name
  • 3
    Good to use with Erlang
  • 2
    Anime mascot

What are some alternatives to Puma, Cowboy?

NGINX

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

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

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

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

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

Passenger

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

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

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

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

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.

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