This document discusses benchmarks and performance testing of Node.js. It notes that while Node.js can handle over 1 million connections, benchmarks are not that important as other factors like productivity. It explores how to meaningfully measure Node.js performance, compares Node.js to other frameworks like Erlang and Tornado, and argues that benchmarks should reflect real-world use cases rather than simplistic "hello world" tests. The document questions overreliance on benchmarks and emphasizes picking the right tool based on the task.

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

2. One million
connections!!!

3. A million isn't
very much these
days...

4. One hundred
billion
connections!!!

5. 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

6. What can we measure?
Computation Disk I/O
Net work I/O Throughput
TCP Libraries
UDP URL Parsing
HTTP etc

7. How do we measure?
Load averages
Memory usage
Average time - Average perf. of each operation
Latency - Actual performance of each operation

8. Comparison
Erlang vs. Node.js vs. Tornado
3 Erlang libs
Stock Node.js
Stock Tornado
Single core

9. Desired vs. Real
Responses

10. Response times

11. I pity the fool who
uses Node

12. Questioning benchmarks
What do average times mean?
Responses on a curve
Who uses in memory servers?

13. 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:~ $

14. 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')
}

15. 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)

16. 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

17. Where to use atomic
measurements
Measuring performance improvements over time
Figuring out the hot-path
Profiling against your specific use case

18. 8x Perf
improvement

19. I am a super
stuff
effective
measurement
Because I put stuff on one axis and
things on another and now I'm like things
proper science and you should totally
use me to base all your judgements
about everything on…
no seriously...

20. Why benchmarks aren't
as important as we think
There is a tradeoff bet ween performance and
productivity
If this weren't true we'd all still be writing in ASM

21. Fit for purpose
Sandboxed language Event Driven
PHP, Python Node.js
Java, C# Event Machine (Ruby)
Ruby, etc Tornado (Python)
Message Passing
Erlang

22. 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 net work server
programming

23. 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.

24. 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

25. Questions?
I'm on Twitter http:/ witter.com/sh1mmer
/t
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