RailsConf 2025 Understanding Ruby Web Server Internals: Puma, Falcon, and... by Manu Janardhanan

Understanding Ruby Web Server Internals: Puma, Falcon, and Pitchfork Compared by Manu Janardhanan As Ruby developers, we often focus on our application code, but the choice of web server can significantly impact performance, scalability, and resource efficiency. In this talk, we’ll explore Puma, Falcon, and Pitchfork - three modern Ruby web servers with distinct execution models. We’ll cover: * How pre-forking and copy-on-write help in minimizing boot time and memory usage. * How Falcon eliminates the traditional challenges of blocking I/O in Ruby, enabling new approaches to IO bound workloads * Why Puma’s hybrid model balances concurrency, performance, and memory usage. * How Pitchfork optimizes for latency and memory efficiency and why it’s a good choice for CPU-bound applications. By the end, you’ll understand how to choose, tune, and optimize your web server for your specific use case