Enhancing scalability using Node.js

Team 15 - Enlighten

Ratan Kadam - ratan.kadam@gmail.com Monil Shah - monil.shaah@gmail.com Akshay Jarandikar - akshayjaradikar@gmail.com Swapnil Joshi - swapnil.joshi1590@gmail.com

Scalability WhyWhat is scalability?

do we need scalability?

Current industry solutions -

• Horizontal Scaling

• Vertical Scaling

• Multi-threading

• Cloud Computing

Horizontal vs Vertical ScalingHorizontal ScalingAdds extra identical boxes to server.

Issues: • Requires Load balancer for

managing connection.• Distribution of work within the

units becomes overhead.• Additional investment.

Vertical ScalingIncreases the power of existing system by adding more powerful hardware.

Issues:• Additional Investment• Single point of failure

(SPOF)

Multi-threading & Cloud ComputingMulti-threadingIssues:-High chances of deadlock if application is not designed properly.-Web-servers need to handle thousands of HTTP requests. This may cause many threads to wait for network operations.-For thousands of simultaneous requests, spawning threads for all processes would not achieve the desired scalability.

Cloud ComputingIssues:-Application architecture may or may not be suited for Cloud Computing-Application and Data Security in the Cloud-Lack of skilled resources; external training is required-If application is not designed properly for cloud platform; difficult to yield benefits-Again, substantial additional investment

So the challenge… The challenge is to scale the web

application without major re-engineering and buying new hardware while keeping

its architecture simple and easy to manage.

Solution

Important Features:

Asynchronous in nature

Event driven

Non-blocking I/O

Proposed Architecture

Proxy Middleware, Entry point for real world access, Security, Caching

Nginx Server Serves static content, Caching

Load Balancer connects multithreaded node.js instances and handles load distribution

V8 JavaScript engine handles compilation and execution of JavaScript

Event loop Handles events in program during execution of asynchronous operations.

Proxy Server

Server Pool

Routing request based on content type

Nginx server

Nginx server stores static data in hierarchical cache. Thus reduces the latency. Also supports compression format to reduce response size.

Node.js Workflow

3 core execution models:1.Asynchronous request processing2.Event driven programming3.Non-blocking I/O

When request is made to server, instead of waiting for the request to complete, server continues to process other requests.

When request processing completes, the response is sent to caller using callback mechanism.

Event listener listens to the events and determines the flow of program. There is an event loop that listens to events and then triggers callback functions.

Non-blocking I/O

Non-blocking I/O supports the execution of system to be continued without waiting for I/O operations to complete.

This enables the architecture to have asynchronous request processing.

Event loopEvent loop is a programming construct that waits for and dispatches events in a program once their asynchronous operation completes.

Node Load Balancer Working

Load balancer distributes the workload among available servers.

Load Balancer sends periodic heartbeat to check server status.

If one of the servers is down then the load balancer distributes the request queue among the available servers.

V8 JavaScript Engine

When V8 receives script source code, it parses it to create abstract syntax tree.

Then this AST is fed into the byte code generator to produce byte code of the source.

V8 execution environment then interprets this byte code and with the help of JIT compiler it produces the native machine code that gets executed.

It uses techniques such as in-lining, elision of expensive runtime properties, and inline caching are used for optimization

CASE STUDYPayPal & eBay with Node.Js

Changes from development perspective -

The development time was almost half that with fewer people.Number of files that were constructed reduced to 40%.The number of lines of code was reduced by 33%.

Changes from performance perspective

The number of requests per second is doubled compared to Java application. The response time is decreased by 35% compared to Java application.

Node.js Vs Traditional Java

Advantages

1. Asynchronous

2. Event driven programming

3. Multithreading

4. Scalability

5. High throughput

6. High Performance

7. Cost effective

8.Minimum Latency

9. Efficient Resource Consumption

10. Set of Standard Libraries

Conclusion

Scalability is next decade challenge for enterprise community as more than 7.1 billion people are using internet.

Most of the vendors use solutions like Horizontal, vertical & single threaded node.js. However, these single threaded architectures may not be able to fix the next generation scalable issues.

Solution to the problem is defined in our proposed architecture – multithreaded node.js where multiple node.js instances are bind to the fixed number of threads to boost the power of existing Node JS.

So multithreaded node.js can be a cost effective, software based scalable solution for next decade challenges for Enterprise industries.

References

Web application performance and scalability http://www.webforefront.com/performance/scaling101.html

Node.js at PayPalhttps://www.paypal-engineering.com/2013/11/22/node-js-at-paypal/

Nginx http://www.aosabook.org/en/nginx.html

Ebay’s first node.js applicationhttp://www.ebaytechblog.com/2013/05/17/how-we-built-ebays-first-node-

js-application/#.VHLrNIvF9hw

Node.js architecture diagramhttp://blog.cloudfoundry.org/2012/06/27/future-proofing-your-apps-cloud-

foundry-and-node-js/

Questions…

Thank You..