Stack Wars: The Node Awakens

Steven Kitzes, Adam Kaplan

2017

Abstract

As the versatility and popularity of cloud technology increases, with storage and compute services reaching unprecedented scale, great scrutiny is now being turned to the performance characteristics of these technologies. Prior studies of cloud system performance analysis have focused on scale-up and scale-out paradigms and the topic of database performance. However, the server-side runtime environments supporting these paradigms have largely escaped the focus of formal benchmarking efforts. This paper documents a performance study intent on benchmarking the potential of the Node.js runtime environment, a rising star among server-side platforms. We herein describe the design, execution, and results of a number of benchmark tests constructed and executed to facilitate direct comparison between Node.js and its most widely-deployed competitor: the LAMP stack. We develop an understanding of the strengths and limitations of these server technologies under concurrent load representative of the computational behaviour of a heavily utilized contemporary web service. In particular, we investigate each server’s ability to handle heavy static file service, remote database interaction, and common compute-bound tasks. Analysis of our results indicates that Node.js outperforms the LAMP stack by a considerable margin in all single-application web service scenarios, and performs as well as LAMP under heterogeneous server workloads.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Kitzes S. and Kaplan A. (2017). Stack Wars: The Node Awakens . In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 3: ICEIS, ISBN 978-989-758-249-3, pages 239-249. DOI: 10.5220/0006280702390249

in Bibtex Style

@conference{iceis17,
author={Steven Kitzes and Adam Kaplan},
title={Stack Wars: The Node Awakens},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 3: ICEIS,},
year={2017},
pages={239-249},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0006280702390249},
isbn={978-989-758-249-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 3: ICEIS,
TI - Stack Wars: The Node Awakens
SN - 978-989-758-249-3
AU - Kitzes S.
AU - Kaplan A.
PY - 2017
SP - 239
EP - 249
DO - 10.5220/0006280702390249