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Unicorn (web server)

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Unicorn
Original author(s)Eric Wong
Developer(s)Unicorn developers
Initial releaseMarch 11, 2009; 15 years ago (2009-03-11)
Stable release
6.1.0[1] Edit this on Wikidata / 25 December 2021; 2 years ago (25 December 2021)
Repositoryyhbt.net/unicorn/
Written inRuby
Operating systemCross-platform
Available inEnglish
TypeWeb server
LicenseGPLv2+ or Ruby 1.8
Websiteyhbt.net/unicorn/ Edit this at Wikidata

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.

Architecture

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Unicorn uses a master/worker architecture, where a master process forks worker processes and controls them. The application runs in a single thread.[2]

Reception and use

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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]

References

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  1. ^ "Rack HTTP server for Unix and fast clients".
  2. ^ a b Fulton, Hal; Arko, André (11 February 2015). The Ruby Way: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming. Addison-Wesley Professional. p. 566. ISBN 978-0321714633.
  3. ^ Bylina, H.N. (2014). Ruby Programming Language. Ruby on Rails framework (PDF). XX International conference for students and young scientists «MODERN TECHNIQUE AND TECHNOLOGIES». Tomsk: IOP Publishing.
  4. ^ "Unicorn Power". 30 March 2010.
  5. ^ "Why did you move to runit + Unicorn". February 2015.
  6. ^ "Category: Web Servers". The Ruby Toolbox. Retrieved 2022-06-29.
  7. ^ "Puma is Now the Recommended Ruby Webserver". 23 January 2015.
  8. ^ Pavese, Tommaso (21 December 2016). "Unicorn vs Puma: Rails server benchmarks". Deliveroo.engineering.
  9. ^ "How we migrated application servers from Unicorn to Puma". GitLab. Retrieved 2022-01-24.
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