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  1. Stackups
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  4. Web Servers
  5. Gunicorn vs Microsoft IIS

Gunicorn vs Microsoft IIS

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Microsoft IIS
Microsoft IIS
Stacks15.5K
Followers7.7K
Votes236
Gunicorn
Gunicorn
Stacks1.3K
Followers908
Votes78
GitHub Stars10.3K
Forks1.8K

Gunicorn vs Microsoft IIS: What are the differences?

  1. Performance: Gunicorn is an HTTP server while Microsoft IIS is a web server. Gunicorn is specifically designed for running Python web applications, which makes it more efficient and optimized for performance compared to IIS, which is a more general-purpose server. Gunicorn uses async workers to handle multiple requests concurrently, resulting in better performance and faster response times.

  2. Platform Compatibility: Gunicorn is compatible with various operating systems including Linux, macOS, and Windows, making it a flexible option for deploying Python applications. On the other hand, Microsoft IIS is primarily designed for Windows servers and may have limitations or compatibility issues when used on other platforms.

  3. Scalability: Gunicorn supports multiple worker processes, where each process can handle concurrent requests. This allows Gunicorn to scale horizontally by adding more worker processes to handle increased traffic. On the contrary, IIS relies on a threading model, which can result in increased resource consumption and limited scalability under heavy load.

  4. Configuration: Gunicorn is configured and managed through command line arguments or configuration files, providing more flexibility and ease of customization. On the other hand, IIS has a graphical user interface (GUI) that allows administrators to configure and manage the server, making it more user-friendly for those who prefer a visual interface.

  5. Integration with Python Web Frameworks: Gunicorn integrates seamlessly with various Python web frameworks such as Django and Flask. It automatically detects and adapts to the application's environment, making deployment and configuration easier. While IIS also supports Python applications, it may require additional configuration and setup to work with specific frameworks.

In summary, Gunicorn offers better performance, platform compatibility, scalability, configuration flexibility, and seamless integration with Python web frameworks compared to Microsoft IIS.

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Advice on Microsoft IIS, Gunicorn

greg00m
greg00m

Mar 9, 2020

Needs advice

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!

766k views766k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Microsoft IIS
Microsoft IIS
Gunicorn
Gunicorn

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.

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.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
10.3K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
1.8K
Stacks
15.5K
Stacks
1.3K
Followers
7.7K
Followers
908
Votes
236
Votes
78
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 83
    Great with .net
  • 55
    I'm forced to use iis
  • 27
    Use nginx
  • 18
    Azure integration
  • 15
    Best for ms technologyes ms bullshit
Cons
  • 1
    Hard to set up
Pros
  • 34
    Python
  • 30
    Easy setup
  • 8
    Reliable
  • 3
    Fast
  • 3
    Light

What are some alternatives to Microsoft IIS, Gunicorn?

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.

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.

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.

Puma

Puma

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.

Caddy

Caddy

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

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