Why would I want to use unicorn or thin instead of WEBrick for development purposes?

Question

I\'ve recently found that some people prefer using unicorn_rails instead of the default WEBrick as a web server for developing Rails applications.

I unders

Answer 1

My personal experience is that Unicorn is much much faster then WEBrick when using a remote machine (ubuntu, 4 cores, 8G mem, connecting though VPN -> ssh) as your development environment (as I do) -- I see sub-1 second page load times with Unicorn, while WEBrick takes 3 to 5 second or more. I'm not sure why, it may have more to do with my network then anything else, but that is what I personally see.

I haven't used Thin for development, as I've read that it requires an additional gem to allow for class reloading in development mode (I can't personally validate the accuracy of that). Also, I am more familiar with Unicorn and use it in production.