Question

With the following enabled:

  app.use(express.session({
    store: sessionStore,
    secret: 'secret',
    key: 'express.sid'}));

Whilst testing my Node.js application the throughput of requests is 650 Requests per second.

When I don’t use express.session, the throughput of requests is 2200 Requests per second.

Testing with apache bench with the following parameters:
-k -c 256 -n 50000 http://localhost:3000/.

I’m testing against the following:

app.get('/', function(req, res)
{
  res.redirect('/login');  
});

Question: Is this a normal drop in performance, or is there something which I should be looking at fixing?

Answer 1

I’d say, it is “normal”. I don’t have any benchmarks myself to compare to yours, but since you are creating session ID from crypto, as well as looking up in your storage (which I hope is memcache or redis or some key/value store), such a drop seems natural. Without session, you are doing absolutely nothing and not waiting for any IO either..