Async vs. Sync I/O benchmark in NodeJs
Oct 24, 2013
NodeJs is a non-blocking I/O platform which gives you ability to do non-blocking and event-based functionalities. It has async methods for I/O but it also provide sync version of that methods as well. It means you can write to a file with async/non-blocking methods and you can do the same with sync methods.
So, in this post I want to show you the different between using async or non-blocking I/O and sync I/O. Here I have a HTTP server which has a simple functionality, it just reads a static file from disk and gives the content of file to the user by an HTTP request. There’s two different ways for reading a file from disk in NodeJs, with fs.open (async) or fs.openSync (sync).
Results speak for themselves, as expected. When we try to read a file with Async mode, all steps of reading a file (stat, open, read, close) are async and it means the reading process will not block the request (less request time) but in Sync mode, each step should wait for previous step result so it takes more than Async mode.
I used Apache Benchmark (ab) for these tests, with this parameters:
ab -n 1000 -c 1000 -vhr http://localhost:8081/
And the test system is:
CentOs, Linux 2.6.18-164.el5 and NodeJs v0.8.8, 512MB Memory, QEMU Virtual CPU.
Well, let’s see the results.
Async mode:
Time taken for tests: 3.800 seconds
Requests per second: 263.19 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 3799.512 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 3.800 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 2667
66% 2682
75% 3752
80% 3752
90% 3761
95% 3765
98% 3765
99% 3765
100% 3765 (longest request)
Sync mode:
Time taken for tests: 4.809 seconds
Requests per second: 207.95 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 4808.944 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 4.809 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 2418
66% 3152
75% 3585
80% 3827
90% 4320
95% 4551
98% 4712
99% 4760
100% 4809 (longest request)
You can see that in the Async mode you can process about 264 requests per second while in Sync mode it’s about 208.
I made this test to show the power of Async I/O functions in NodeJs and also to show the NodeJs developers that using Sync I/O functions is not a good solution for Callback Hell, there are several better approaches to solve the Callback Hell problem, keep using Async functions.
You can download and run this test yourself, I made a Github repo, here you can download them: https://github.com/afshinm/Async-Sync-IO-benchmark