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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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

Advice on Gunicorn and Puma
Mark Ndungu
Software Developer at Nouveta · | 4 upvotes · 27K views
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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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Consider trying to use puma workers first. puma -w basically. That will launch multiple puma processes to manage the requests, like unicorn, but also run threads within those processes. You can turn the number of workers and number of threads to find the right memory footprint / request per second balance.

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Pros of Gunicorn
Pros of Puma
  • 34
    Python
  • 30
    Easy setup
  • 8
    Reliable
  • 3
    Light
  • 3
    Fast
  • 4
    Free
  • 3
    Convenient
  • 3
    Easy
  • 2
    Multithreaded
  • 2
    Consumes less memory than Unicorn
  • 2
    Default Rails server
  • 2
    First-class support for WebSockets
  • 1
    Lightweight
  • 1
    Fast

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Cons of Gunicorn
Cons of Puma
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 0
      Uses `select` (limited client count)

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    What is 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.

    What is 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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    What tools integrate with Gunicorn?
    What tools integrate with Puma?
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