Gunicorn vs Puma

Overview

Puma

Stacks1.2K

Followers265

Votes20

GitHub Stars7.8K

Forks1.5K

Gunicorn

Stacks1.3K

Followers908

Votes78

GitHub Stars10.3K

Forks1.8K

Gunicorn vs Puma: What are the differences?

Introduction

In the world of web development, Gunicorn and Puma are both popular web server options for running Python and Ruby applications, respectively. While they both serve the same purpose of handling incoming web requests, there are key differences between Gunicorn and Puma that impact their performance and usage.

Concurrency Model: Gunicorn uses a pre-fork model, where it creates multiple worker processes to handle incoming requests. Each worker process can handle a single request at a time. On the other hand, Puma uses a hybrid model that combines multiple threads within each worker process. This allows Puma to handle multiple requests concurrently, improving its throughput and scalability.
Language Compatibility: Gunicorn is specifically designed for running Python web applications. It leverages the capabilities of the Python ecosystem and integrates well with popular Python frameworks. In contrast, Puma is built for Ruby applications and provides excellent support for Ruby web frameworks, such as Ruby on Rails and Sinatra.
Configuration Flexibility: Gunicorn offers a variety of configuration options that allow fine-tuning of its behavior. It can be easily customized to meet specific application requirements. Puma, on the other hand, has a simpler configuration setup and focuses on providing reasonable defaults. While Puma's configuration options are more limited compared to Gunicorn, this simplicity can be advantageous for developers who prefer less complexity.
Memory Overhead: Gunicorn's pre-fork model results in higher memory overhead compared to Puma's hybrid model. Since each worker process in Gunicorn is a separate Python interpreter, the memory consumption can increase significantly when running multiple worker processes. Puma's thread-based approach saves memory by sharing resources within each worker process.
Performance Scaling: When it comes to scaling performance, Puma's concurrency model is generally considered superior to Gunicorn's. The thread-based design allows Puma to handle a higher number of concurrent connections compared to Gunicorn's process-based model. This makes Puma a better choice for applications that require high concurrency and fast response times.
Community and Ecosystem: Gunicorn has a larger and more mature community compared to Puma. It benefits from being the de facto standard for Python web servers and has a wide range of community-contributed plugins and extensions. Puma, although popular within the Ruby ecosystem, may have a smaller community and fewer additional features available.

In summary, Gunicorn and Puma differ in their concurrency models, language compatibility, configuration flexibility, memory overhead, performance scaling, and community support. These differences should be considered when choosing the appropriate web server for a specific application.

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Advice on Puma, Gunicorn

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

Puma	Gunicorn
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.	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 7.8K	GitHub Stars 10.3K
GitHub Forks 1.5K	GitHub Forks 1.8K
Stacks 1.2K	Stacks 1.3K
Followers 265	Followers 908
Votes 20	Votes 78
Pros & Cons
Pros 4 Free 3 Convenient 3 Easy 2 Multithreaded 2 Default Rails server Cons 0 Uses `select` (limited client count)	Pros 34 Python 30 Easy setup 8 Reliable 3 Fast 3 Light

What are some alternatives to Puma, Gunicorn?

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.

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

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.

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.

Caddy

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

Related Comparisons

Gunicorn vs Puma: What are the differences?

Introduction

Concurrency Model: Gunicorn uses a pre-fork model, where it creates multiple worker processes to handle incoming requests. Each worker process can handle a single request at a time. On the other hand, Puma uses a hybrid model that combines multiple threads within each worker process. This allows Puma to handle multiple requests concurrently, improving its throughput and scalability.
Language Compatibility: Gunicorn is specifically designed for running Python web applications. It leverages the capabilities of the Python ecosystem and integrates well with popular Python frameworks. In contrast, Puma is built for Ruby applications and provides excellent support for Ruby web frameworks, such as Ruby on Rails and Sinatra.
Configuration Flexibility: Gunicorn offers a variety of configuration options that allow fine-tuning of its behavior. It can be easily customized to meet specific application requirements. Puma, on the other hand, has a simpler configuration setup and focuses on providing reasonable defaults. While Puma's configuration options are more limited compared to Gunicorn, this simplicity can be advantageous for developers who prefer less complexity.
Memory Overhead: Gunicorn's pre-fork model results in higher memory overhead compared to Puma's hybrid model. Since each worker process in Gunicorn is a separate Python interpreter, the memory consumption can increase significantly when running multiple worker processes. Puma's thread-based approach saves memory by sharing resources within each worker process.
Performance Scaling: When it comes to scaling performance, Puma's concurrency model is generally considered superior to Gunicorn's. The thread-based design allows Puma to handle a higher number of concurrent connections compared to Gunicorn's process-based model. This makes Puma a better choice for applications that require high concurrency and fast response times.
Community and Ecosystem: Gunicorn has a larger and more mature community compared to Puma. It benefits from being the de facto standard for Python web servers and has a wide range of community-contributed plugins and extensions. Puma, although popular within the Ruby ecosystem, may have a smaller community and fewer additional features available.

Gunicorn vs Puma

Overview