Book Image

Node.js Design Patterns

By : Mario Casciaro
Book Image

Node.js Design Patterns

By: Mario Casciaro

Overview of this book

Node.js is a massively popular software platform that lets you use JavaScript to easily create scalable server-side applications. It allows you to create efficient code, enabling a more sustainable way of writing software made of only one language across the full stack, along with extreme levels of reusability, pragmatism, simplicity, and collaboration. Node.js is revolutionizing the web and the way people and companies create their software. In this book, we will take you on a journey across various ideas and components, and the challenges you would commonly encounter while designing and developing software using the Node.js platform. You will also discover the "Node.js way" of dealing with design and coding decisions. The book kicks off by exploring the fundamental principles and components that define the platform. It then shows you how to master asynchronous programming and how to design elegant and reusable components using well-known patterns and techniques. The book rounds off by teaching you the various approaches to scale, distribute, and integrate your Node.js application.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Node.js Design Patterns
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Cloning and load balancing


Traditional, multithreaded web servers are usually scaled only when the resources assigned to a machine cannot be upgraded any more or when doing so would involve a higher cost than simply launching another machine. By using multiple threads, traditional web servers can take advantage of all the processing power of a server, using all the available processors and memory. However, a single Node.js process is unable to do that, being single-threaded and having a memory limit of 1GB (on 64-bit machines, which can be increased to a maximum of 1.7GB). This means that Node.js applications are usually scaled much sooner compared to traditional web servers, even in the context of a single machine, to be able to take advantage of all its resources.

Note

In Node.js, vertical scaling (adding more resources to a single machine) and horizontal scaling (adding more machines to the infrastructure) are almost equivalent concepts; both in fact involve similar techniques to leverage...