A million connections...AND BEYOND!!!Node.js at Scale

One million connections!!!

A million isn't very much these

days...

One hundredbillion

connections!!!

What this talk is really about

Picking meaningful benchmarks

Current state of Node.js benchmarks

Understanding why benchmarks aren't _that_ important

How to pick the right language/framework/lib

What can we measure?

Computation

Network I/O

TCP

UDP

HTTP

Disk I/O

Throughput

Libraries

URL Parsing

etc

How do we measure?

Load averages

Memory usage

Average time - Average perf. of each operation

Latency - Actual performance of each operation

Comparison

Erlang vs. Node.js vs. Tornado

3 Erlang libs

Stock Node.js

Stock Tornado

Single core

Desired vs. RealResponses

Response times

I pity the fool who uses Node

Questioning benchmarks

What do average times mean?

Responses on a curve

Who uses in memory servers?

Finding Node's strength

connections: 933990

errors: 0

Read from remote host gqzdj9ab.joyent.us: Operation timed out

Connection to gqzdj9ab.joyent.us closed.

Enki:~ $

var net = require('net')

var conns = 0

function connectToServer(ip) { conn = net.createConnection(8000, ip) conn.on('connect', function() { conns += 1 }) conn.on('end', function() { conns -= 1 })}

for(i=0;i<61000;i++) { connectToServer('72.2.120.106')}

var net = require('net')

var s = net.createServer()var c = 0;var e = 0;

s.on('connection', function(socket) { c += 1

socket.on('end', function() { c -= 1 }) socket.on('error', function(e) { e += 1 })})

s.listen(8000)

setInterval(function() { console.log('connections: ' + c) console.log('errors: ' + e)}, 5000)

Finding Node's strength PID USERNAME SIZE RSS STATE PRI NICE TIME CPU PROCESS/NLWP

22593 root 758M 642M cpu11 25 0 0:17:54 6.2% node/1

22542 croucher 4308K 3084K cpu2 59 0 0:00:08 0.2% prstat/1

...

...

ZONEID NPROC SWAP RSS MEMORY TIME CPU ZONE

27 31 1489M 782M 38% 1:59:54 6.3% gqzdj9ab

Where to use atomic measurements

Measuring performance improvements over time

Figuring out the hot-path

Profiling against your specific use case

8x Perf improvement

I am a super effective

measurementBecause I put stuff on one axis and things on another and now I'm like

proper science and you should totally use me to base all your judgements

about everything on…

no seriously...

things

stuff

Why benchmarks aren't as important as we think

There is a tradeoff between performance and productivity

If this weren't true we'd all still be writing in ASM

Fit for purpose

Sandboxed language

PHP, Python

Java, C#

Ruby, etc

Event Driven

Node.js

Event Machine (Ruby)

Tornado (Python)

Message Passing

Erlang

Class of languages for the Internet

New languages/platforms like Node.js designed for Internet applications

New class of languages are efficient enough, but are they easy enough?

Node.js designed from scratch for network server programming

Reasons to use Node

It's really fast. Very much fast enough.

It's easy to use for Internet/Web applications.

It's JavaScript.

It has an extremely active community.

It has a lot of project velocity.

What we need from benchmarks

Benchmarks to test real world use cases

Servers that do more than just 'hello world'

Benchmarks to compare real test cases from many platforms

Benchmarks that reflect mobile clients

Node CI on many platforms

Questions?

I'm on Twitter http://twitter.com/sh1mmer

That's a "one" in my nick

Check out the book on http://ofps.oreilly.com

It's free to read and comment. New release this week