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lighttpd vs Unicorn: What are the differences?
What is lighttpd? A secure, fast, compliant, and very flexible web-server that has been optimized for high-performance environments. 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.
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.
lighttpd and Unicorn belong to "Web Servers" category of the tech stack.
"Lightweight" is the primary reason why developers consider lighttpd over the competitors, whereas "Fast" was stated as the key factor in picking Unicorn.
Unicorn is an open source tool with 1.35K GitHub stars and 249 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Unicorn's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Unicorn has a broader approval, being mentioned in 176 company stacks & 55 developers stacks; compared to lighttpd, which is listed in 15 company stacks and 4 developer stacks.
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.
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.
Pros of lighttpd
- Lightweight7
- Easy setup6
- Virtal hosting2
- Simplicity2
- Full featured2
- Proxy2
- Open source2
- Available modules1
- Fast1
- Security1
- Ssl support1
Pros of Unicorn
- Fast81
- Performance59
- Web server36
- Very light30
- Open Source30
- Rack http server27
- Load balancing18
- Great process management14
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Cons of lighttpd
Cons of Unicorn
- Not multithreaded4
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What is lighttpd?
What is Unicorn?
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