Node.js scalability investigation in the cloud

Abstract

Node.js has gained popularity in cloud development due to its asynchronous, non-blocking and event-driven nature. However, scalability issues can limit the number of concurrent requests while achieving an acceptable level of performance. To the best of our knowledge, no cloud-based benchmarks or metrics focusing on Node.js scalability exist. This paper presents the design and implementation of Ibenchjs, a scalability-oriented benchmarking framework, and a set of sample test applications. We deploy Ibenchjs in a local and isolated cloud to collect and report scalability-related measurements and issues of Node.js as well as performance bottlenecks. Our findings include: 1) the scaling performance of the tested Node.js test applications was sub-linear; 2) no improvements were measured when more CPUs were added without modifying the number of Node.js instances; and 3) leveraging cloud scaling solutions significantly outperformed Node.js-module-based scaling