Investigate Node vs C# server resource usage, web socket limitations

[tjcouch-sil]

As an architect, I want to know how well Node would suit us as a web server technology as opposed to C# to determine if we should use a C# web server or Node web server (assuming we do not go with Electron-Edge as referenced in #9).

• Are we limiting ourselves using Node websocket as opposed to a C# websocket?
• How do startup and resource use look between C# and Node?

[tjcouch-sil]

Node vs C# websockets

It seems from some testing that different socket connections run on different threads in C# without any particular configuration. They seem to swap to different threads sometimes. I'm not clear on what the implications are of this discovery, but I don't believe Node websockets are multithreaded. There must be some locking and unlocking when reading/writing the messages in C# or something. I suppose you could write something to implement such functionality in Node.

EDIT: async/await creates new tasks and may schedule on different threads. So doing things with websocket messages is pretty much inherently multithreaded in C#. This feels much more natural than having to do things to make this happen in Node, but it can still be done.

Resource usage

In Windows 10:

Express:
Start server then navigate to website url: ~1.5-2 seconds
Uses ~45-50 MB memory

ASP.NET:
Start server then navigate to website url: ~.5 seconds
Uses ~28-31 MB memory

[irahopkinson]

@tjcouch-sil I asssume the above results are on Win 10? Do we see similar results on Linux and MacOS? Using WSL2 or dual boot to Linux would be a fair comparison since its the same machine but I'm not sure how you make the comaprison on MacOS. We need to be continually thinking x-platform, perhaps we should determine a way to make a fair comparison.

[tjcouch-sil]

@irahopkinson Yes, that was in Windows 10. Good clarification. I don't have the experience with WSL2 to do much with Linux right now. Maybe we can investigate those further another time. Looks like the electron-edge-js test was successful enough that the startup time will not be that significant a difference (server startup time would affect websocket communication with external executables like FLEx, but internal apis do not need to wait on the server if we use edge as everything is passing through electron ipc and edge).