Why does Unicorn need to be deployed together with Nginx?

Question

I would like to know the difference between Nginx and Unicorn. As far as I understand, Nginx is a web server while Unicorn is a Ruby HTTP server.

Since both Nginx an

Answer 1

Nginx can be used to serve slow clients on a unicorn server as slow clients would choke the unicorn server. Nginx is used as some sort of proxy buffering all requests and responses to slow clients.

See http://unicorn.bogomips.org/