What are Unicorn considered “fast” and “slow” requests?

Question

The unicorn talks about this for "fast customers." Whenever I read a detailed description of this, it is explained by the fact that it is suitable, for example, for the nginx proxy server serving HTTP requests, and not for launching an application that does a long poll.

Well, it makes sense, but the more common case when the request is “slow” is when the POST takes a lot of time, either because it loads a lot of data (file download), or because the action causes processing in an application that takes a lot time.

How does a unicorn behave in these two cases? Where can I find out more about this?

Answer 1

I think the idea is that Unicorn does not have hundreds or thousands of open requests. Having a slow form post is great if you don't have hundreds of users publishing this form at the same time. We have several places where you can upload images on our website, and these pages usually take a few seconds to load and process the image before returning to the user, and we had no problem. But we do not have thousands of users uploading images at the same time.

Rainbows! this is a unicorn-like web server for long polling requests: http://rainbows.rubyforge.org/