Question

I am comparing performance of Node.js (0.5.1-pre) vs Apache (2.2.17) for a very simple scenario – serving a text file.

Here’s the code I use for node server:

var http = require('http')
  , fs = require('fs')

fs.readFile('/var/www/README.txt',
    function(err, data) {
        http.createServer(function(req, res) {
            res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'})
            res.end(data)
        }).listen(8080, '127.0.0.1')
    }
)

For Apache I am just using whatever default configuration which goes with Ubuntu 11.04

When running Apache Bench with the following parameters against Apache

ab -n10000 -c100 http://127.0.0.1/README.txt

I get the following runtimes:

Time taken for tests:   1.083 seconds
Complete requests:      10000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      27630000 bytes
HTML transferred:       24830000 bytes
Requests per second:    9229.38 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       10.835 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.108 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          24903.11 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   0.8      0       9
Processing:     5   10   2.0     10      23
Waiting:        4   10   1.9     10      21
Total:          6   11   2.1     10      23

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%     10
  66%     11
  75%     11
  80%     11
  90%     14
  95%     15
  98%     18
  99%     19
 100%     23 (longest request)

When running Apache bench against node instance, these are the runtimes:

Time taken for tests:   1.712 seconds
Complete requests:      10000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      25470000 bytes
HTML transferred:       24830000 bytes
Requests per second:    5840.83 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       17.121 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.171 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          14527.94 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   0.9      0       8
Processing:     0   17   8.8     16      53
Waiting:        0   17   8.6     16      48
Total:          1   17   8.7     17      53

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%     17
  66%     21
  75%     23
  80%     25
  90%     28
  95%     31
  98%     35
  99%     38
 100%     53 (longest request)

Which is clearly slower than Apache. This is especially surprising if you consider the fact that Apache is doing a lot of other stuff, like logging etc.

Am I doing it wrong? Or is Node.js really slower in this scenario?

Edit 1: I do notice that node’s concurrency is better – when increasing a number of simultaneous request to 1000, Apache starts dropping few of them, while node works fine with no connections dropped.

Answer 1

Dynamic requests

node.js is very good at handling at lot small dynamic requests(which can be hanging/long-polling). But it is not good at handling large buffers. Ryan Dahl(Author node.js) explained this one of his presentations. I recommend you to study these slides. I also watched this online somewhere.

Garbage Collector

As you can see from slide(13 from 45) it is bad at big buffers.

Slide 15 from 45:

V8 has a generational garbage
collector. Moves objects around
randomly. Node can’t get a pointer to
raw string data to write to socket.

Use Buffer

Slide 16 from 45

Using Node’s new Buffer object, the
results change.

Still not that good as for example nginx, but a lot better. Also these slides are pretty old so probably Ryan has even improved this.

CDN

Still I don’t think you should be using node.js to host static files. You are probably better of hosting them on a CDN which is optimized for hosting static files. Some popular CDN‘s(some even free for) via WIKI.

NGinx(+Memcached)

If you don’t want to use CDN to host your static files I recommend you to use Nginx with memcached instead which is very fast.