| Original author(s) | Eric Wong |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Unicorn developers |
| Initial release | March 11, 2009 |
| Stable release | |
| Repository | yhbt.net/unicorn/ |
| Written in | Ruby |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Available in | English |
| Type | Web server |
| License | GPLv2+ or Ruby 1.8 |
| Website | yhbt |
Unicorn is a Rack HTTP server to serve Ruby web applications on UNIX environment. It is optimised to be used with nginx. It is based on now deprecated Mongrel 1.1.5 from 2008.
Unicorn uses a master/worker architecture, where a master process forks worker processes and controls them. The application runs in a single thread. [2]
Unicorn was considered as “one of the most popular servers for Rails”. [3] [2]
Twitter started to test Unicorn in 2010. [4]
This server is shipped with Discourse. Their system administrator Sam Saffron noted Unicorn was reliable, as it reaps unresponsive workers. [5]
Unicorn inspired other projects like Gunicorn, a fork to run Python applications.
As of 2018, projects tend to favour Puma. [6] The Heroku hosting provider recommends since 2015 to migrate from Unicorn to Puma. [7] Deliveroo published a benchmark comparing the two servers and concluded “Puma performs better than Unicorn in all tests that were either heavily IO-bound or that interleaved IO and CPU work”, but that Unicorn was still slightly better performing in pure CPU situations. [8] GitLab switched to Puma from Unicorn in 2020. [9]
Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system which originated from the Computing Science Research Center (CSRC) at Bell Labs in the mid-1980s and built on UNIX concepts first developed there in the late 1960s. Since 2000, Plan 9 has been free and open-source. The final official release was in early 2015.
lighttpd is an open-source web server optimized for speed-critical environments while remaining standards-compliant, secure and flexible. It was originally written by Jan Kneschke as a proof-of-concept of the c10k problem – how to handle 10,000 connections in parallel on one server, but has gained worldwide popularity. Its name is a portmanteau of "light" and "httpd".
Ruby on Rails is a server-side web application framework written in Ruby under the MIT License. Rails is a model–view–controller (MVC) framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and web pages. It encourages and facilitates the use of web standards such as JSON or XML for data transfer and HTML, CSS and JavaScript for user interfacing. In addition to MVC, Rails emphasizes the use of other well-known software engineering patterns and paradigms, including convention over configuration (CoC), don't repeat yourself (DRY), and the active record pattern.
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The Gunicorn "Green Unicorn" is a Python Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI) HTTP server. It is a pre-fork worker model, ported from Ruby's Unicorn project. The Gunicorn server is broadly compatible with a number of web frameworks, simply implemented, light on server resources and fairly fast. It is often paired with Nginx, as the two have complementary features.
RocksDB is a high performance embedded database for key-value data. It is a fork of Google's LevelDB optimized to exploit multi-core processors (CPUs), and make efficient use of fast storage, such as solid-state drives (SSD), for input/output (I/O) bound workloads. It is based on a log-structured merge-tree data structure. It is written in C++ and provides official language bindings for C++, C, and Java. Many third-party language bindings exist. RocksDB is free and open-source software, released originally under a BSD 3-clause license. However, in July 2017 the project was migrated to a dual license of both Apache 2.0 and GPLv2 license. This change helped its adoption in Apache Software Foundation's projects after blacklist of the previous BSD+Patents license clause.
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Puma is an HTTP web server derived from Mongrel and written by Evan Phoenix. It stresses speed and efficient use of memory.
