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Puma vs nginx: What are the differences?
Introduction:
In today's digital landscape, web servers play a vital role in serving web content efficiently and securely. Two popular options for web servers are Puma and Nginx. While both serve a similar purpose, there are key differences between the two worth noting.
1. Scalability: Puma is designed as a Ruby web server and can handle multiple concurrent requests using a multi-threaded approach. It is efficient in serving Ruby on Rails applications and can scale well to a certain extent. On the other hand, Nginx is an event-driven web server that focuses on scalability and can handle a large number of requests simultaneously. It uses an asynchronous, non-blocking approach, making it more suitable for high-traffic websites.
2. Load Balancing: Puma can perform load balancing when used in conjunction with a load balancer like Nginx or HAProxy. It distributes incoming requests across multiple server instances, ensuring efficient resource utilization. Nginx, on the other hand, has built-in load balancing capabilities and can evenly distribute requests among multiple upstream servers, providing better scalability and fault tolerance.
3. Reverse Proxy: Nginx excels as a reverse proxy, acting as an intermediary between clients and a web server. Its efficient architecture and reverse proxy capabilities allow it to handle static file serving, SSL/TLS termination, caching, and other tasks effectively. Puma, on the other hand, focuses primarily on serving dynamic Ruby applications and does not support reverse proxy functionality out of the box.
4. Supported Languages: Puma is specifically designed to serve Ruby applications, particularly Ruby on Rails. It integrates seamlessly with Ruby frameworks and provides an optimized performance for Ruby-based web applications. Nginx, on the other hand, is a versatile web server that supports multiple programming languages and can handle a wide range of web applications, including but not limited to Ruby, PHP, Python, and Node.js.
5. Configuration and Customization: Nginx offers an extensive and flexible configuration system, allowing administrators to fine-tune various server parameters and customize its behavior to suit specific requirements. It provides options to modify request handling, caching, compression, and many other aspects. Puma, being a Ruby web server, has a more limited configuration scope in comparison and primarily focuses on optimizing performance for Ruby applications.
6. Ecosystem and Tooling: Nginx has a vibrant and well-established ecosystem with various third-party modules and tools available. These modules can extend the functionality of Nginx, enabling advanced features such as caching, rate limiting, security enhancements, and more. Puma, being more specialized for Ruby applications, has a smaller ecosystem but still benefits from the broader Ruby community and tooling available for Ruby on Rails.
In Summary, while Puma and Nginx both serve as web servers, there are significant differences between them in terms of scalability, load balancing, reverse proxy capabilities, supported languages, configuration flexibility, and ecosystem/tooling. These factors should be carefully considered when choosing the appropriate web server for specific use cases and requirements.
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.
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!
I would pick nginx over both IIS and Apace HTTP Server any day. Combine it with docker, and as you grow maybe even traefik, and you'll have a really flexible solution for serving http content where you can take sites and projects up and down without effort, easily move it between systems and dont have to handle any dependencies on your actual local machine.
From a StackShare Community member: "We are a LAMP shop currently focused on improving web performance for our customers. We have made many front-end optimizations and now we are considering replacing Apache with nginx. I was wondering if others saw a noticeable performance gain or any other benefits by switching."
I use nginx because it is very light weight. Where Apache tries to include everything in the web server, nginx opts to have external programs/facilities take care of that so the web server can focus on efficiently serving web pages. While this can seem inefficient, it limits the number of new bugs found in the web server, which is the element that faces the client most directly.
I use nginx because its more flexible and easy to configure
I use Apache HTTP Server because it's intuitive, comprehensive, well-documented, and just works
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.
- Server rendered HTML output from PHP is being migrated to the client as Vue.js components, future plans to provide additional content, and other new miscellaneous features all result in a substantial increase of static files needing to be served from the server. NGINX has better performance than Apache for serving static content.
- The change to NGINX will require switching from PHP to PHP-FPM resulting in a distributed architecture with a higher complexity configuration, but this is outweighed by PHP-FPM being faster than PHP for processing requests.
- The NGINX + PHP-FPM setup now allows for horizontally scaling of resources rather vertically scaling the previously combined Apache + PHP resources.
- PHP shell tasks can now efficiently be decoupled from the application reducing main application footprint and allow for scaling of tasks on an individual basis.
Pros of NGINX
- High-performance http server1.4K
- Performance894
- Easy to configure730
- Open source607
- Load balancer530
- Free289
- Scalability288
- Web server226
- Simplicity175
- Easy setup136
- Content caching30
- Web Accelerator21
- Capability15
- Fast14
- High-latency12
- Predictability12
- Reverse Proxy8
- Supports http/27
- The best of them7
- Great Community5
- Lots of Modules5
- Enterprise version5
- High perfomance proxy server4
- Embedded Lua scripting3
- Streaming media delivery3
- Streaming media3
- Reversy Proxy3
- Blash2
- GRPC-Web2
- Lightweight2
- Fast and easy to set up2
- Slim2
- saltstack2
- Virtual hosting1
- Narrow focus. Easy to configure. Fast1
- Along with Redis Cache its the Most superior1
- Ingress controller1
Pros of Puma
- Free4
- Convenient3
- Easy3
- Multithreaded2
- Consumes less memory than Unicorn2
- Default Rails server2
- First-class support for WebSockets2
- Lightweight1
- Fast1
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Cons of NGINX
- Advanced features require subscription10
Cons of Puma
- Uses `select` (limited client count)0