Jetty vs Unicorn

Overview

Unicorn

Stacks479

Followers401

Votes295

GitHub Stars1.5K

Forks269

Jetty

Stacks510

Followers311

Votes47

Jetty vs Unicorn: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Jetty and Unicorn are both popular web servers used for serving Ruby on Rails applications. However, they have distinct differences that set them apart from each other.

Programming Language: Jetty is written in Java, while Unicorn is written in Ruby. This means that developers with expertise in either Java or Ruby may prefer one over the other based on their familiarity with the programming language.
Concurrency Model: Unicorn utilizes a pre-forking server model, where a master process forks multiple worker processes to handle incoming requests. On the other hand, Jetty uses a thread-based server model, where each incoming request is handled by a separate thread. This difference in concurrency models can affect performance and scalability of the web server.
Memory Management: Jetty is known for its efficient memory usage, making it a suitable option for applications with limited resources. Unicorn, on the other hand, can consume more memory due to its pre-forking model. Developers need to consider the memory requirements of their application when choosing between Jetty and Unicorn.
Configuration Handling: Jetty typically requires more configuration to set up compared to Unicorn, which is designed to be simpler and more straightforward. For developers looking for a web server that is easy to configure and deploy, Unicorn may be a more suitable choice.
Community and Support: Jetty has been around for a longer period and has a larger community of users and contributors. This means that there is more extensive documentation, support forums, and resources available for Jetty compared to Unicorn. Developers may consider the level of community support when deciding between the two web servers.
Compatibility: Jetty is a versatile web server that can be used with a variety of programming languages and frameworks, while Unicorn is specifically designed for Ruby on Rails applications. Depending on the requirements of the project, developers may choose Jetty for its compatibility with different technologies or Unicorn for its seamless integration with Ruby on Rails.

In Summary, Jetty and Unicorn differ in programming language, concurrency model, memory management, configuration handling, community and support, and compatibility, making it essential for developers to choose based on their specific needs and preferences.

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Advice on Unicorn, Jetty

Mark

Software Developer at Nouveta

Mar 4, 2022

Needs adviceon

Rails

Ruby

Puma

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.

38.4k views38.4k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Unicorn	Jetty
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.	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.
-	Full-featured and standards-based; Open source and commercially usable; Flexible and extensible; Small footprint; Embeddable; Asynchronous; Enterprise scalable; Dual licensed under Apache and Eclipse
Statistics
GitHub Stars 1.5K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 269	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 479	Stacks 510
Followers 401	Followers 311
Votes 295	Votes 47
Pros & Cons
Pros 81 Fast 59 Performance 36 Web server 30 Open Source 30 Very light Cons 4 Not multithreaded	Pros 15 Lightweight 10 Embeddable 10 Very fast 6 Very thin 6 Scalable Cons 0 Student

What are some alternatives to Unicorn, Jetty?

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

Related Comparisons

Jetty vs Unicorn: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Jetty and Unicorn are both popular web servers used for serving Ruby on Rails applications. However, they have distinct differences that set them apart from each other.

Programming Language: Jetty is written in Java, while Unicorn is written in Ruby. This means that developers with expertise in either Java or Ruby may prefer one over the other based on their familiarity with the programming language.
Concurrency Model: Unicorn utilizes a pre-forking server model, where a master process forks multiple worker processes to handle incoming requests. On the other hand, Jetty uses a thread-based server model, where each incoming request is handled by a separate thread. This difference in concurrency models can affect performance and scalability of the web server.
Memory Management: Jetty is known for its efficient memory usage, making it a suitable option for applications with limited resources. Unicorn, on the other hand, can consume more memory due to its pre-forking model. Developers need to consider the memory requirements of their application when choosing between Jetty and Unicorn.
Configuration Handling: Jetty typically requires more configuration to set up compared to Unicorn, which is designed to be simpler and more straightforward. For developers looking for a web server that is easy to configure and deploy, Unicorn may be a more suitable choice.
Community and Support: Jetty has been around for a longer period and has a larger community of users and contributors. This means that there is more extensive documentation, support forums, and resources available for Jetty compared to Unicorn. Developers may consider the level of community support when deciding between the two web servers.
Compatibility: Jetty is a versatile web server that can be used with a variety of programming languages and frameworks, while Unicorn is specifically designed for Ruby on Rails applications. Depending on the requirements of the project, developers may choose Jetty for its compatibility with different technologies or Unicorn for its seamless integration with Ruby on Rails.

Jetty vs Unicorn

Overview