NodeJS Performance: Best Ways to Notch Up the Application Speed

Across the web, NodeJs is used to run 2% of the websites. Given its robust architecture and capabilities, NodeJs developers would certainly want to know the secret to better performance. High-speed applications help businesses get higher revenue and increase their traffic footprint. 

To improve the speed of a NodeJs application, set up a consistent monitoring mechanism to identify performance issues. Work on reducing the latency through application caching and follow the clustering approach. Today, we will share the best tips and secrets to improve NodeJs application performance. 

Why Choose NodeJs for Application Development?

NodeJs is an excellent runtime environment, which means we put it in the same stead as an application software, framework, or library. It’s a runtime environment, which includes a collection of web APIs and a JavaScript engine. The Web APIs are used for coding, and the JS engine is used for parsing the code. 

Due to these two functions, working with NodeJs is convenient and faster. Plus, this makes NodeJS lightweight, versatile, and easier to deploy. Using these factors, a NodeJs web development company can optimize the application and improve its speed of work. 

• Language Sharing: When developers choose NodeJs for backend development, they have the option to choose another JavaScript framework for front-end development. This allows for language sharing across the development stack making the application more consistent. 
• Faster Development: JavaScript is an easy-to-learn programming language. Those who have experience in JavaScript will concur with the following aspects;
• Setting up servers is faster. 
• Great to use for microservices construction.
• Good choice for prototyping solutions. 
• Allows switching between dynamic and static typing, as required. 
• Node Package Manager (NPM): Developers can get copies of code scripts other developers have used and shared. Using the code packages from NPM, the development work will reduce to a great extent. 
• Support for AWS: To host applications, you need a host technology. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers native support for NodeJs, which means deploying web applications on the web is super-efficient, secure, and quick. 

NodeJs makes full-stack development easier and streamlined. The advantages it offers to the developers, by virtue of being a runtime environment, are helping developers build bespoke applications for every type of business. 

Secrets to Increase Application Performance and Speed

Organizations like Netflix, Twitter, and Uber are using NodeJs to build their backend solutions. For technology to support these solutions’ massive load, there must be some ways to increase the application speed. For a backend development services provider, using these tips means making their clients and users happier and satisfied. 

• Application Monitoring

  Monitoring and measuring the application’s performance is the first step of increasing its speed. For this purpose, we want you to run your application through multiple tests. These include;

  • Stress Testing: This test explicitly measures the capabilities of the application. Stress testing is done to check the application’s performance when it’s made to work outside normal working conditions. The developers use this test to assess the application’s potential and tolerance levels. Most importantly, this test also finds out how quickly the application can come back after failing. 
  • Spike Testing: This test checks the application’s performance when there’s an unexpected rise or drop in the load. The massive surge in load tests the application’s performance to its core and helps identify the issues. 
  • Volume Testing: Sometimes, application storage servers swell with vast amounts of data. To ensure that it does not crash under this heavy load, volume testing is conducted to check the response and implement corrective measures. 
  • Load Testing: This test is done after NodeJs web app development is complete to check the application’s response. The deliberate attempt checks the application’s response while simulating the real workload and tests its potential. The key is to assess how much burden the application can take before it fails or crashes. 

  The purpose of conducting all these tests is to check the application’s limits. From these tests, we can get information about the performance metrics, including average latency, requests per second, memory usage, number of concurrent users, throughput, response times, and error rates. 

  As you get the required information, work on the metrics which are underperforming. Doing so will certainly improve the applications’ performance and speed. However, don’t stop here; run the tests again to check whether the improvements you have done are working. 

  Going forward, set up an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) system. Using that, you can observe and track the application performance and make the required changes as required. 

• Exercise Caching to Reduce Latency

  In the development world, caching is the time required for a data packet to travel from the source to the destination. For effective application performance, correcting the application aspects that cause latency is imperative. 

  As a top NodeJs development company, implement server-side caching. This will help you improve the application’s performance. What server-side caching does is improve the speed of data retrieval? It does in one of two ways;

  • Spending relatively less time in computing the data requested. 
  • By implementing I/O (which implies retrieving data from the network or a database). 

  In simple words, caching is a high-speed storage layer working as a temporary storage location. The cache is where temporarily stored because it is accessed often. With caching in operation, the users won’t have to access data from the primary source every time. Hence it speeds up the process and adds to the user experience. 

  Caching is great for applications that have data which is often accessed and not changed regularly. You can identify data that is requested frequently by the users, and the data does not need to be altered; caching it is better. This way, the application’s response time will be quicker for these requests. 

  Another way to use caching to increase the application’s speed is caching the computationally intensive activities. However, this will only work when the results of these activities are always the same. Doing so won’t clog the servers when such requests are raised frequently. 

  Lastly, you can also set up caching for API requests that are relayed to an external system. Here too, the system will work when you know that the results can be reused. Hence, you can store the API request results in the cache layer. So when the request is sent to the external network, it will take relatively less time to produce the output. 

  How to Implement Caching in NodeJs Web Development?

  To execute cache layering and memory setup in NodeJs, you need to use node-cache. The purpose is to place actively used memory and data in cache memory. From here, the data and results can be accessed quickly. 

  This system works well for an application process with single workflows. However, in the case of distributed workflows, such a system won’t be reliable. In that case, you must implement distributed caching, like Redis or Memcached. 

• Implement Timeouts in I/O Operations

  Developers providing backend development services with NodeJs will understand the next statement. 

  “It’s common to make mistakes while working with Timeout.”

  What happens is when you delegate a server to run the backend operations, it might also communicate with other external services. Those services might establish contact with further services. In this chain of services, even if one service is unresponsive, your customer’s experience will take a hit, which is not good for your business. 

  This usually happens during the development phase. But even if this phase goes smoothly, there is no guarantee that all the dependencies will respond on time. This is where the concept of Timeouts is relevant. 

  The premise of setting a Timeout (Read Timeout) is establishing the maximum amount of time set for a request to fulfill. This is decided according to the client’s acceptable wait time for the external service to respond before they start to feel frustrated. 

  When Timeouts are set, the application will shut down, or the service requested aborts if the response does not come within the specified time limit. This is done to ensure that the application does not hang indefinitely. 

  The reason we said that making mistakes is common when Timenodejsouts are concerned is that the majority of libraries don’t have a default timeout set. So, you have to manually set it up. Follow the process for the same below;

  Assuming that you are working with Axios in NodeJs development services, use the following code script to set up Timeout. 

  const axios = require(“axios”);

  axios.defaults.timeout === 1000; // global timeout of 1s

  Not doing so won’t allow the API to hold the user’s request indefinitely. In the code snippet above, we have set the timeout figure at 1000 ms or 1 second. This means any request made won’t take any longer than this to return the response, even if the API is unresponsive. 

  During the Timeout setup, don’t confuse this with connection timeout. Connection timeout sets the limit between which the TCP connection must establish. Also, note that the connection timeout is lower than the read timeout. This is because if the connection establishment is taking too long, the user can switch and get a response before the read timeout executes. 

  Before setting the time limits for the connection and read timeout, you can monitor the response times for APIs. Special tools are available to help developers track the API calls and identify the response time. 

• Data Handling Optimization

  Optimization is a pivotal element in NodeJs application performance and speed. Optimizing the application and its aspects improves its efficiency. For this purpose, we want you to look at some data handling methods optimization. 

  The first step, analyze how data is handled at present. In the majority of NodeJs applications, the data requested is retrieved from the server through an API request. But that is the best way to get a response. 

  Here are some other data handling methods you must check out and implement for your application. 

  • Pagination: In this, the replies or responses are divided into separate batches of content. The users can browse these responses but with selected-response requests. Implementing this strategy helps improve the response times. 
  • Filtering: The filtering strategy allows the users to limit their results according to their requirements. As a result, the number of calls and results displayed are reduced while giving users a better view of the results they require. 

• Implementation of SSL/TLS and HTTP/2

  For a NodeJs web app development company, building a fast-performing application needs HTTP/2. This will make web browsing faster and more convenient while reducing bandwidth. 

  With HTTP/2 implementation, the application’s performance is increased, and the earlier issues with HTTP/1 are resolved. HTTP/2 brings the following benefits;

  • Header Compression: Executing this, all the unnecessary headers are disabled. In addition to this, all HTTP headers are sent after compressing. 
  • Multiplexing: With this enabled, the application can complete multiple requests simultaneously and retrieve the data required. All this is done over a single TCP connection. With multiplexing, the number of requests sent to the server are reduced, hence optimizing the cost and time required to establish a new TCP connection. 

• Clustering for a Better Throughput

  In clustering, the child processes or workers that usually run concurrently are executed on a single port. For NodeJs web app development, clustering is used horizontally scaling the NodeJs server associated with a single machine. One of the benefits of clustering is reduction in downtime, performance slowdowns, and  outages. 

  This happens because all the incoming connections are distributed across different available servers and worker processes. As a result, the CPU cores have higher bandwidth in terms of performance. For NodeJs specifically, clustering is required, but it runs on a single thread. Due to this, applications built on NodeJs cannot run on multi-core systems. 

  For your reference, we have shared a code script;

  const cluster = require(“cluster”);

  const http = require(“http”);

  const process = require(“process”);

  const os = require(“os”);

  const cpus = os.cpus;

  const numCPUs = cpus().length;

  if (cluster.isPrimary) {

    console.log(`Primary ${process.pid} is running`);

    // Fork workers.

    for (let i = 0; i < numCPUs; i++) {

      cluster.fork();

    }

    cluster.on(“exit”, (worker, code, signal) => {

      console.log(`worker ${worker.process.pid} died`);

    });

  } else {

    // Workers can share any TCP connection

    // In this case it is an HTTP server

    http

      .createServer((req, res) => {

        res.writeHead(200);

        res.end(“hello world\n”);

      })

      .listen(8000);

    console.log(`Worker ${process.pid} started`);

  }

  After executing this code script, all the connections sent to Port 8000 will be distributed between the worker processes. While this helps improve the application’s performance, the code you need to write for this function is in large amounts. 

  Moreover, changing the number of processes when the application is running is impossible. But a solution is to use the PM2 process, which takes care of the spawning worker processes. Plus, it will also keep a check on stopping and restarting workers, along with distributing the requests from users between workers. 

• Follow Load Balancing

  Load balancing is about distributing the incoming traffic and their requests. Using NodeJs for web development means you can duplicate the application and process more connections, but this requires upgrading the application to a multicore server. 

  By default, NodeJs application development is implemented on the single thread method. But to scale it to the multicore server, developers need to introduce the cluster module. The multicore process generates new processes, referred to as workers. 

  These workers run simultaneously while staying connected to a master process. This way, all the workers will share the same server port functioning as a single multithreaded NodeJs server. With this setting, developers can enable load balancing and distribute the connections and requests to different workers. 

  Another method for load balancing is using the PM2 process manager. Using PM2, you can keep the applications running forever. Ensuring this leads to avoiding downtime, especially when there are changes or errors in the code. 

Conclusion

To increase the speed and performance of your NodeJs application, there are multiple things you can implement. By executing strategies like load balancing, TLS and HTTP/2 implementation, clustering, etc., you can reduce the pressure of requests and connections on the servers. Some of the measures we have shared above help in increasing the server bandwidth and distributing the requests. 

The end result of implementing all these measures means the NodeJs application will run faster, recording better performance. Implement the methods while working on NodeJs web app development to enforce better performance early on.