Book Image

Mastering Node.js

By : Sandro Pasquali
Book Image

Mastering Node.js

By: Sandro Pasquali

Overview of this book

Node.js is a modern development stack focused on providing an easy way to build scalable network software. Backed by a growing number of large companies and a rapidly increasing developer base, Node is revolutionizing the way that software is being built today. Powered by Google's V8 engine and built out of C++ modules, this is a JavaScript environment for the enterprise.Mastering Node.js will take the reader deep into this exciting development environment. Beginning with a comprehensive breakdown of its innovative non-blocking evented design, Node's structure is explained in detail, laying out how its blazingly fast I/O performance simplifies the creation of fast servers, scalable architectures, and responsive web applications.Mastering Node.js takes you through a concise yet thorough tour of Node's innovative evented non-blocking design, showing you how to build professional applications with the help of detailed examples.Learn how to integrate your applications with Facebook and Twitter, Amazon and Google, creating social apps and programs reaching thousands of collaborators on the cloud. See how the Express and Path frameworks make the creation of professional web applications painless. Set up one, two, or an entire server cluster with just a few lines of code, ready to scale as soon as you're ready to launch. Move data seamlessly between databases and file systems, between clients, and across network protocols, using a beautifully designed, consistent, and predictable set of tools.Mastering Node.js contains all of the examples and explanations you'll need to build applications in a short amount of time and at a low cost, running on a scale and speed that would have been nearly impossible just a few years ago.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Mastering Node.js
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

When to scale?


The theory around application scaling is a complex and interesting topic that continues to be refined and expanded. A comprehensive discussion of the topic would require several books, curated for different environments and needs. For our purposes we will simply learn how to recognize when scaling up (or even scaling down) is necessary.

Having a flexible architecture that can add and subtract resources as needed is essential to a resilient scaling strategy. A vertical scaling solution does not always always suffice (simply adding memory or CPUs will not deliver the necessary improvements). When should horizontal scaling be considered?

Note

One simple but useful way to check the CPU and memory usage commanded by Node processes running on a server is to use the Unix ps command, in combination with grep:

ps –A u | grep node

This will list all of your Node processes, and their resource allotments.

Network latency

When network response times are exceeding some threshold, such as each...