Book Image

Node.js High Performance

By : Resende
Book Image

Node.js High Performance

By: Resende

Overview of this book

Take your application to the next level of high performance using the extensive capabilities of Node.js About This Book Analyze, benchmark, and profile your Node.js application to find slow spots, and push it to the limit by eliminating performance bottlenecks Learn the basis of performance analysis using Node.js Explore the high performance capabilities of Node.js, along with best practices In Detail Node.js is a tool written in C, which allows you to use JavaScript on the server-side. High performance on a platform like Node.js is knowing how to take advantage of every aspect of your hardware, helping memory management act at its best, and correctly deciding how to architect a complex application. Do not panic if your applications start consuming a lot of memory; instead spot the leak and solve it fast with Node.js by monitoring and stopping it before it becomes an issue. This book will provide you with the skills you need to analyze the performance of your application and monitor the aspects that can and should be. Starting with performance analysis concepts and their importance in helping Node.js developers eliminate performance bottlenecks, this book will take you through development patterns to avoid performance penalties. You will learn the importance of garbage collection and its behaviour,and discover how to profile your processor, allowing better performance and scalability. You will then learn about the different types of data storage methods. Moving on, you will get to grips with testing and benchmarking applications to avoid unknown application test zones. Lastly, you will explore the limits that external components can impose in your application in the form of bottlenecks. By following the examples in each chapter, you will discover tips to getting better performing applications by avoiding anti-patterns and stretching the limits of your environment as much as possible. What You Will Learn Develop applications using well-defined and well-tested development patterns Explore memory management and garbage collection to improve performance Monitor memory changes and analyze heap snapshots Profile the CPU and improve your code to avoid patterns that force intensive processor usage Understand the importance of data and when you should cache information Learn to always test your code and benchmark when needed Extend your application’s scope and know what other elements can influence performance Who This Book Is For This book is for Node.js developers who want a more in-depth knowledge of the platform to improve the performance of their applications. Whether you have a base Node.js background or you are an expert who knows the garbage collector and wants to leverage it to make applications more robust, the examples in this book will benefit you. Style and approach This is a practical guide to learning high performance, which even the least experienced developer will comprehend. Small and simple examples help you test concepts yourself and easily adapt them to any application, boosting its performance and preparing it for the real-world.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Node.js patterns

Because of the structure and API model of the Node.js platform, some patterns are more biased or natural. The most obvious are the event-driven and the event stream patterns. They're not enforced but strongly engrained in the core API, and you're forced to use it in some parts of your application, so it's better to know how they work individually, how they work together, and how you can benefit from them.

Using the core API, you can access the filesystem, for example, to read a file with a single method and a callback; or you can request a read stream and then check the data and end events or pipe the stream to somewhere else. This is very useful when, say, you don't want to look at the file and just want to serve it to a client. This architecture was designed to work for core modules such as http and net. Similarly, when listening for client connections, you'll have to listen for a connection event (unless you have defined a connection listener...