Edit(2): Now using db-mysql with generic-pool module. The error rate has dropped significantly and hovers at 13% but the throughput is still around 100 req/sec.
Edit(1): After someone suggesting that ORDER BY RAND() would cause MySQL to be slow, I had removed that clause from the query. Node.js now hovers around 100 req/sec but still the server reports 'CONNECTION error: Too many connections'.
Node.js or Lighttpd with PHP?
You probably saw many "Hello World" benchmarking of node.js... but "hello world" tests, even those that were delayed by 2 seconds per request, are not even close to real world production usage. I also performed those variations of "Hello World" tests using node.js and saw throughput of about 800 req/sec with 0.01% error rate. However, I decided to some tests that were a bit more realistic.
Maybe my tests are not complete, most likely something is REALLY wrong about node.js or my test code and so if your a node.js expert, please do help me write some better tests. My results are published below. I used Apache JMeter to do the testing.
Test Case and System Specs
The test is pretty simple. A mysql query for number of users is ordered randomly. The first user's username is retrieved and displayed. The mysql database connection is through a unix socket. The OS is FreeBSD 8+. 8GB of RAM. Intel Xeon Quad Core 2.x Ghz processor. I tuned the Lighttpd configurations a bit before i even came across node.js.
Apache JMeter Settings
Number of threads (users) : 5000 I believe this is the number of concurrent connections
Ramp up period (in seconds) : 1
Loop Count : 10 This is the number of requests per user
Apache JMeter End Results
Label | # Samples | Average | Min | Max | Std. Dev. | Error % | Throughput | KB/sec | Avg. Bytes HTTP Requests Lighttpd | 49918 | 2060ms | 29ms | 84790ms | 5524 | 19.47% | 583.3/sec | 211.79 | 371.8 HTTP Requests Node.js | 13767 | 106569ms | 295ms | 292311ms | 91764 | 78.86% | 44.6/sec | 79.16 | 1816
Result Conclusions
Node.js was so bad i had to stop the test early. [Fixed Tested completely]
Node.js reports "CONNECTION error: Too many connections" on the server. [Fixed]
Most of the time, Lighttpd had a throughput of about 1200 req/sec.
However, node.js had a throughput of about 29 req/sec. [Fixed Now at 100req/sec]
This is the code i used for node.js (Using MySQL pools)
var cluster = require('cluster'), http = require('http'), mysql = require('db-mysql'), generic_pool = require('generic-pool');
var pool = generic_pool.Pool({
name: 'mysql',
max: 10,
create: function(callback) {
new mysql.Database({
socket: "/tmp/mysql.sock",
user: 'root',
password: 'password',
database: 'v3edb2011'
}).connect(function(err, server) {
callback(err, this);
});
},
destroy: function(db) {
db.disconnect();
}
});
var server = http.createServer(function(request, response) {
response.writeHead(200, {"Content-Type": "text/html"});
pool.acquire(function(err, db) {
if (err) {
return response.end("CONNECTION error: " + err);
}
db.query('SELECT * FROM tb_users').execute(function(err, rows, columns) {
pool.release(db);
if (err) {
return response.end("QUERY ERROR: " + err);
}
response.write(rows.length + ' ROWS found using node.js<br />');
response.end(rows[0]["username"]);
});
});
});
cluster(server)
.set('workers', 5)
.listen(8080);
This this is the code i used for PHP (Lighttpd + FastCGI)
<?php
$conn = new mysqli('localhost', 'root', 'password', 'v3edb2011');
if($conn) {
$result = $conn->query('SELECT * FROM tb_users ORDER BY RAND()');
if($result) {
echo ($result->num_rows).' ROWS found using Lighttpd + PHP (FastCGI)<br />';
$row = $result->fetch_assoc();
echo $row['username'];
} else {
echo 'Error : DB Query';
}
} else {
echo 'Error : DB Connection';
}
?>
ORDER BY RAND()is slow in MySQL, this wouldn't be a fair test if your database is causing some of the delay. – Thoreau