REST Server Performance

Compare simple REST server performance in Node.js and Go.

Both servers do the same - parse the JSON body and return it back in the response. No external libraries are used, just the builtin APIs.

Install

• Node.js
• Go
• wrk

The POST request is defined in post.lua. The content is ~4KB JSON.

$ node -v
v10.1.0
$ go version
go version go1.10.1 linux/amd64
$ cat /etc/issue
Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS \n \l

CPU: Intel® Core™ i7 CPU @ 2.20GHz × 4

Node.js

Start the server

$ node server.js
Listening on port 3000

Run the test in a separate console

$ wrk -d 20s -s post.lua http://localhost:3000
Running 20s test @ http://localhost:3000
  2 threads and 10 connections
  Thread Stats   Avg      Stdev     Max   +/- Stdev
    Latency     1.05ms  410.09us  12.83ms   85.53%
    Req/Sec     4.85k   729.92     5.84k    65.42%
  194145 requests in 20.10s, 432.14MB read
Requests/sec:   9658.75
Transfer/sec:     21.50MB

During the test the node process runs at ~100% CPU and ~70MB memory.

Go with GOMAXPROCS=1

Start the server

$ GOMAXPROCS=1 go run server.go
2018/05/19 23:45:39 Listening on port 3000

To get comparable results we start the go server with GOMAXPROCS=1 as Node.js executes JavaScript in a single thread. To utilize multiple CPU cores with Node.js you could use the cluster module. Anyway, in the cloud your process usually gets one core or even less.

Run the test in a separate console

$ wrk -d 20s -s post.lua http://localhost:3000
Running 20s test @ http://localhost:3000
  2 threads and 10 connections
  Thread Stats   Avg      Stdev     Max   +/- Stdev
    Latency   689.89us  401.59us   7.40ms   68.67%
    Req/Sec     7.44k   728.13     8.14k    89.55%
  297390 requests in 20.10s, 671.60MB read
Requests/sec:  14795.37
Transfer/sec:     33.41MB

During the test the server process runs at ~100% CPU and ~10MB memory.

Go

Start the server

$ go run server.go
2018/05/19 23:45:39 Listening on port 3000

Run the test in a separate console

$ wrk -d 20s -s post.lua http://localhost:3000
Running 20s test @ http://localhost:3000
  2 threads and 10 connections
  Thread Stats   Avg      Stdev     Max   +/- Stdev
    Latency   283.51us  284.38us  10.48ms   93.11%
    Req/Sec    19.23k     1.59k   21.29k    79.60%
  769098 requests in 20.10s, 1.70GB read
Requests/sec:  38262.62
Transfer/sec:     86.41MB