What is the benefit of installing gunicorn for my django app on heroku?

Question

I have recently switched to Django for a web app I'm developing and I followed the instructions at Heroku for getting a Django app running on Heroku. I have a virtual environment in which my app is developed and I use git for version control and to push to Heroku. The link above suggests that I intall gunicorn:

The examples above used the default HTTP server for Django. For production apps, you may wish to use a more production-ready embedded webserver, such as Tornado, gevent’s WSGI server, or Gunicorn.

They then walk the user through installing Gunicorn.

My question is: what problems might I run into if I skip this step and just stay with the default? What benefits will Gunicorn give me?

Answer 1

Gunicorn is production ready and really easy to use. I use it for my websites. You usually should run it via a reverse proxy like Nginx. I'm not sure what Heroku is using. You really should try it.

In my experience it's much easier to use and configure than apache & mod_wsgi, and the other similar setups.

edit/update: As a summary of the comments below, Heroku already uses Nginx as a reverse proxy

Answer 2

Much better performance, and probably better security and stability, too. Django's development web server (which is used by Heroku by default) isn't really designed to serve production applications.

Answer 3

django's server, is a development server . It is light weigh and easy to use but should not be used in production because it is not production ready. it cannot handle many requests. This link offers a comparison between gunicorn, uwsgi and django's development server.