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NGINX Unit

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NGINX Unit vs Passenger: What are the differences?

  1. Scalability: NGINX Unit is designed for scalable, microservices-based architectures, providing the ability to scale horizontally by adding more instances as needed. It utilizes a decentralized architecture, allowing each instance to run independently, which ensures high performance and efficiency. On the other hand, Passenger is designed for traditional, monolithic applications and offers a single, centralized application server. While it can scale vertically by adding more resources to the server, it may not be as suitable for highly scalable architectures.

  2. Supported Languages: NGINX Unit supports a wide range of programming languages, including Python, Go, PHP, Ruby, Perl, JavaScript (Node.js), and more. It offers a flexible and modular approach, allowing developers to use their preferred language and frameworks. In contrast, Passenger primarily focuses on Ruby applications, providing a mature and optimized environment for Ruby on Rails applications. It may not have the same level of flexibility and support for other languages as NGINX Unit.

  3. Configuration: NGINX Unit uses a dynamic configuration model, allowing changes to the configuration to take effect immediately without the need for restarting the server. It provides an extensive set of configuration options, enabling fine-grained control over the behavior of applications. Passenger, on the other hand, relies on a static configuration file that needs to be reloaded or the server needs to be restarted whenever changes are made. This may limit the flexibility and agility in managing the application's configuration.

  4. Deployment: NGINX Unit offers easy and flexible deployment options, supporting various deployment models such as containerized environments (e.g., Docker), cloud environments (e.g., AWS, Azure), and bare-metal servers. It allows applications to be deployed independently, providing isolation and flexibility. In contrast, Passenger is primarily designed for deployment within a web server (e.g., Apache or NGINX) as a module or integration. It may require additional configuration and setup to integrate and deploy applications.

  5. Load Balancing: NGINX Unit includes built-in load balancing capabilities, allowing it to distribute incoming requests across multiple instances of an application for improved performance and availability. It provides various load balancing algorithms and can automatically detect instances that are unavailable or overloaded. In comparison, Passenger does not offer built-in load balancing capabilities and relies on external load balancers or web servers for distributing traffic.

  6. Monitoring and Management: NGINX Unit provides a comprehensive set of API endpoints and tools for monitoring and managing applications. It offers real-time metrics, logs, and allows programmatically controlling application lifecycle. Additionally, it integrates well with existing monitoring and management systems. Passenger, on the other hand, may have limited monitoring and management features, depending on the web server or environment it is integrated with.

In Summary, NGINX Unit and Passenger differ in terms of scalability, supported languages, configuration flexibility, deployment options, load balancing capabilities, and monitoring/management features. While NGINX Unit excels in scalability, language support, flexible configuration, and deployment options, Passenger provides optimized performance for Ruby applications and may be easier to integrate with existing web servers.

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Pros of NGINX Unit
Pros of Passenger
  • 3
    PHP
  • 2
    Python
  • 2
    Golang
  • 2
    Multilang
  • 1
    Node.js
  • 1
    Ruby
  • 43
    Nginx integration
  • 36
    Great for rails
  • 21
    Fast web server
  • 19
    Free
  • 15
    Lightweight
  • 14
    Scalable
  • 13
    Rolling restarts
  • 10
    Multithreading
  • 9
    Out-of-process architecture
  • 6
    Low-bandwidth
  • 2
    Virtually infinitely scalable
  • 2
    Deployment error resistance
  • 2
    Mass deployment
  • 2
    High-latency
  • 1
    Many of its good features are only enterprise level
  • 1
    Apache integration
  • 1
    Secure
  • 1
    Asynchronous I/O
  • 1
    Multiple programming language support

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Cons of NGINX Unit
Cons of Passenger
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 0
      Cost (some features require paid/pro)

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    What is NGINX Unit?

    NGINX Unit is a dynamic web application server, designed to run applications in multiple languages. Unit is lightweight, polyglot, and dynamically configured via API. The design of the server allows reconfiguration of specific application parameters as needed by the engineering or operations.

    What is 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.

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    What tools integrate with NGINX Unit?
    What tools integrate with Passenger?

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    What are some alternatives to NGINX Unit and Passenger?
    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.
    Docker
    The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere
    uWSGI
    The uWSGI project aims at developing a full stack for building hosting services.
    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.
    PHP-FPM
    It is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation with some additional features useful for sites of any size, especially busier sites. It includes Adaptive process spawning, Advanced process management with graceful stop/start, Emergency restart in case of accidental opcode cache destruction etc.
    See all alternatives