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  5. Mongoose Web Server vs Unicorn

Mongoose Web Server vs Unicorn

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Unicorn
Unicorn
Stacks479
Followers401
Votes295
GitHub Stars1.5K
Forks269
Mongoose Web Server
Mongoose Web Server
Stacks12
Followers37
Votes3
GitHub Stars12.3K
Forks2.9K

Mongoose Web Server vs Unicorn: What are the differences?

Introduction

In the world of web servers, Mongoose and Unicorn are popular choices for serving web applications. Understanding the key differences between Mongoose Web Server and Unicorn can help developers make informed decisions based on their specific requirements.

  1. Programming Language Compatibility: Mongoose Web Server is written in C language, making it highly compatible with C-based applications, while Unicorn is written in Ruby, making it more suitable for Ruby on Rails applications.

  2. Concurrency Model: Mongoose Web Server follows a multi-threaded approach where each connection is handled by a separate thread, while Unicorn follows a multi-process model, with each process handling a single connection. This affects how they handle requests and manage resources.

  3. Scalability: Unicorn is known for its scalability as it can easily handle a high number of concurrent connections due to its process-per-connection model. On the other hand, Mongoose Web Server may face limitations in handling a large number of connections due to its thread-based approach.

  4. Configuration: Unicorn is generally considered to have more complex configuration settings compared to Mongoose Web Server, which provides simpler configuration options. Developers may choose based on their preference and technical expertise when it comes to configuration setup.

  5. Community and Ecosystem: Unicorn has a large and active community of Ruby developers supporting and contributing to its ecosystem, providing a wealth of resources and plugins. Mongoose Web Server, on the other hand, may have a smaller community and ecosystem due to its language-specific nature.

In Summary, understanding the key differences such as programming language compatibility, concurrency model, scalability, configuration complexity, and community support can help developers decide between Mongoose Web Server and Unicorn based on their project requirements.

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Advice on Unicorn, Mongoose Web Server

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.

38.4k views38.4k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Unicorn
Unicorn
Mongoose Web Server
Mongoose Web Server

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.

Mongoose is built on top of Libmongoose embedded library, which can turn anything into a web server in 5 minutes worth of effort and few lines of code. Libmongoose is used to serve Web GUI on embedded devices, implement RESTful services, RPC frameworks (e.g. JSON-RPC), handle telemetry data exchange, and perform many other tasks in various different industries including aerospace, manufacturing, finance, research, automotive, gaming, IT.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
1.5K
GitHub Stars
12.3K
GitHub Forks
269
GitHub Forks
2.9K
Stacks
479
Stacks
12
Followers
401
Followers
37
Votes
295
Votes
3
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 81
    Fast
  • 59
    Performance
  • 36
    Web server
  • 30
    Open Source
  • 30
    Very light
Cons
  • 4
    Not multithreaded
Pros
  • 1
    Web server
  • 1
    Light weight
  • 1
    Easy to configure

What are some alternatives to Unicorn, Mongoose Web Server?

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.

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.

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.

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