Is Node.js Scalable?

Node.js Development - Laitkor

Yes, it is scalable in the sense that “it can be scaled to indefinite size,” but not as other way you are thinking to suggest. Scaling doesn’t generally involve just getting a more powerful machine, although that can make you a way. Node.js developers are the responsible members who care for Node.js development and security.

Scalability of Node.js

1.     It has limits and to call it scalable sometimes, it should have those limits. It is vertical scalability and you need horizontal scalability. You can run a cluster on a single machine to use all the CPU cores to do that. And you can also run multiple machines to spread it out further to spread the load by using a load balancer.

2.     You can sometime run Facebook scale on Node, and it would probably be cheaper than what they have done with PHP, but it won’t happen by default.

3.    If you want a site that has moderate traffic, uses a CDN for static assets, and uses a database that is itself scalable, you could probably do ok with a single-threaded instance of node.js doing nothing special. Depending on how you designed things, this could be a major engineering effort, or a relative straightforward one.

4.   Scalability is always more about implementation and hardware than the choice of server platform. Facebook even found a way to scale PHP.

5.    Node.js is not scalable by default. If you run clusters, use a load balancer, cache as much as possible in memory, write efficient database queries, serve static content from a separate machine (or S3) with a CDN in front of it, and fine-tune your client side with caching and reduce the number of redundant requests. Then you are relatively scalable infrastructure.

6.   Node.js usually scales better than most other typical platforms because of its event-based model. You can understand this as, Say you have a service with intermediate amount of work to be done- some database work, some data conversions, auth and the regular stuff.

7.     Node.js needs something like 80-100 MB of RAM at the start, and waits for request. For each request to a db, Node will fire that request, and then- go back to sleep- while it waits for results. So in typical use case, an average developer will make more scalable server with Node.js development, simply because Node.js doesn’t do anything at all 95% of the time.

Node.js by default runs on a single thread that can be solved by clustering. It can be scaled using the factors mentioned but then again so could most apps in most language. There are ways in Node.js to scale other than using a high spec machine. Scalable applications are not just dependent on systems but rather the application architecture used. Node.js can be a great asset in any scalable network if used properly.

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