Lwan vs Unicorn

Overview

Unicorn

Stacks479

Followers401

Votes295

GitHub Stars1.5K

Forks269

Lwan

Stacks1

Followers6

Votes4

GitHub Stars6.0K

Forks551

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.

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Advice on Unicorn, Lwan

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.

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Unicorn	Lwan
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.	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.
-	Low memory footprint (~500KiB for 10k idle connections);Minimal memory allocations & copies;Minimal system calls;Hand-crafted HTTP request parser;Static file serving uses the most efficient way according to file size;No copies between kernel and userland for files larger than 16KiB;Smaller files are sent using vectored I/O;Header overhead is considered before considering deflate compression;Mostly wait-free multi-threaded design;One thread accepts connections, one I/O thread per logical CPU handles them;Hand-crafted coroutines makes asynchronous I/O a breeze in C;Linux only, as it relies on epoll();Purpose-built I/O loop;Efficient loading cache used for;Directory listing;File information (size, last modified date, MIME type, etc);Compressed files;Diminute codebase with roughly 7200 lines of C code
Statistics
GitHub Stars 1.5K	GitHub Stars 6.0K
GitHub Forks 269	GitHub Forks 551
Stacks 479	Stacks 1
Followers 401	Followers 6
Votes 295	Votes 4
Pros & Cons
Pros 81 Fast 59 Performance 36 Web server 30 Open Source 30 Very light Cons 4 Not multithreaded	Pros 1 High-performance http server 1 Performance 1 Free 1 C and Lua Scripting

What are some alternatives to Unicorn, Lwan?

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.

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 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.