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  5. Apache HTTP Server vs Gunicorn vs Jetty

Apache HTTP Server vs Gunicorn vs Jetty

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Apache HTTP Server
Apache HTTP Server
Stacks64.5K
Followers22.8K
Votes1.4K
GitHub Stars3.8K
Forks1.2K
Jetty
Jetty
Stacks510
Followers311
Votes47
Gunicorn
Gunicorn
Stacks1.3K
Followers908
Votes78
GitHub Stars10.3K
Forks1.8K

Apache HTTP Server vs Gunicorn vs Jetty: What are the differences?

# Introduction

1. **Scalability**: Apache HTTP Server is known for its ability to handle a large number of concurrent connections efficiently, making it suitable for high-traffic websites. On the other hand, Gunicorn is designed specifically for handling asynchronous Python web applications, providing better support for applications with long-running requests. Jetty, on the other hand, is a lightweight server that excels in handling small to medium-sized web applications with a focus on performance and low resource consumption.

2. **Configuration**: Apache HTTP Server uses configuration files such as httpd.conf to manage its settings, providing a high level of customization and flexibility. Gunicorn uses Python scripts for configuration, making it easier to integrate with Python-based applications and simplifying the setup process for developers. In contrast, Jetty allows for configuration through XML files, providing a structured approach to defining server settings and application environments.

3. **Protocol Support**: Apache HTTP Server supports a wide range of protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP, making it versatile for handling various types of web traffic. Gunicorn focuses primarily on the WSGI protocol for Python applications, ensuring compatibility with a wide range of frameworks and applications built on WSGI standards. Jetty supports multiple protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS, SPDY, and WebSocket, offering developers flexibility in choosing the appropriate protocol for their applications.

4. **Performance**: Apache HTTP Server is known for its high performance and reliability, making it a popular choice for mission-critical websites with demanding performance requirements. Gunicorn offers good performance for Python applications, especially those requiring asynchronous handling of requests. Jetty is optimized for performance and resource efficiency, making it a suitable choice for applications that prioritize speed and responsiveness.

5. **Community Support**: Apache HTTP Server has a large and active community of developers and users, providing extensive documentation, support forums, and plugins for extending its functionality. Gunicorn benefits from the Python community's support and resources, with a strong focus on Python web development best practices and optimizations. Jetty has a dedicated community that focuses on enhancing the server's performance, security, and usability through regular updates and contributions from developers.

6. **Use Cases**: Apache HTTP Server is commonly used for hosting static websites, dynamic content, and web applications that require high availability and scalability. Gunicorn is preferred for deploying Python web applications that leverage asynchronous features for improving performance and responsiveness. Jetty is ideal for lightweight web applications, microservices, and APIs that prioritize speed, low resource consumption, and efficient handling of web requests.

# Summary

In summary, Apache HTTP Server, Gunicorn, and Jetty offer unique advantages in terms of scalability, configuration, protocol support, performance, community support, and use cases, catering to a diverse range of web application requirements.

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Advice on Apache HTTP Server, Jetty, Gunicorn

Daniel
Daniel

Co-Founder at Polpo Data Analytics & Software Development

May 25, 2021

Decided

For us, NGINX is a lite HTTP server easy to configure. On our research, we found a well-documented software we a lot of support from the community.

We have been using it alongside tools like certbot and it has been a total success.

We can easily configure our sites and have a folder for available vs enabled sites, and with the nginx -t command we can easily check everything is running fine.

289k views289k
Comments
Hari
Hari

Mar 3, 2020

Needs advice

I was in a situation where I have to configure 40 RHEL servers 20 each for Apache HTTP Server and Tomcat server. My task was to

  1. configure LVM with required logical volumes, format and mount for HTTP and Tomcat servers accordingly.
  2. Install apache and tomcat.
  3. Generate and apply selfsigned certs to http server.
  4. Modify default ports on Tomcat to different ports.
  5. Create users on RHEL for application support team.
  6. other administrative tasks like, start, stop and restart HTTP and Tomcat services.

I have utilized the power of ansible for all these tasks, which made it easy and manageable.

419k views419k
Comments
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

Apache HTTP Server
Apache HTTP Server
Jetty
Jetty
Gunicorn
Gunicorn

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.

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.

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.

-
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
3.8K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
10.3K
GitHub Forks
1.2K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
1.8K
Stacks
64.5K
Stacks
510
Stacks
1.3K
Followers
22.8K
Followers
311
Followers
908
Votes
1.4K
Votes
47
Votes
78
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 479
    Web server
  • 305
    Most widely-used web server
  • 217
    Virtual hosting
  • 148
    Fast
  • 138
    Ssl support
Cons
  • 4
    Hard to set up
Pros
  • 15
    Lightweight
  • 10
    Very fast
  • 10
    Embeddable
  • 6
    Very thin
  • 6
    Scalable
Cons
  • 0
    Student
Pros
  • 34
    Python
  • 30
    Easy setup
  • 8
    Reliable
  • 3
    Fast
  • 3
    Light

What are some alternatives to Apache HTTP Server, Jetty, 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.

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.

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.

Cowboy

Cowboy

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.

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