A couple important reasons it’s written in Ruby (see http://github.com/ruby/ruby/tree/trunk/lib/webrick) Edited it doesn’t have many features that a production website usually needs, like multiple workers (in particular, pre-forking, life cycle management, asynchronous handling, etc), redirects, rewriting, etc When I mention redirects/rewrites, I’m referring to the fact that using Webrick, you have to handle rewrites at … Read more
Nginx is a pure web server that’s intended for serving up static content and/or redirecting the request to another socket to handle the request. Unicorn is a Rack web server and only intended to host a ‘Rack App’ which is usually generating dynamic content. Rack apps can also serve up static content but it’s less … Read more
Pre-forking basically means a master creates forks which handle each request. A fork is a completely separate *nix process. Update as per the comments below. The pre in pre-fork means that these processes are forked before a request comes in. They can however usually be increased or decreased as the load goes up and down. … Read more