Performance is extremely important for any web application. A fast application will satisfy its users, developers, and associated stakeholders. Whereas, a slow one will infuriate them. Node.js framework- being a fast one, has seen its popularity grow in leaps and bounds. Today, it has become a universal development framework for enterprises that are looking forward to developing highly efficient and data-intensive applications which are capable of running across distributed devices. Node.js monitoring can be utilized to build chat engines, real-time tracking apps, online gaming portals, social networking sites, e-commerce marketplaces, interactive websites, and much more.
Given the criticality of Node.js, enterprises must give the monitoring aspect of Node.js its due importance. Technology teams need to keep an eye on the app performance and undertake adequate steps to maintain or enhance the overall app performance. Most companies are looking for a highly-efficient Node.js development company like Copperchips to assist them with monitoring processes. Some of the companies, on the other hand, are investing their time and efforts in off-the-shelf Nodejs monitoring solutions that detect issues contributing to slow response times.
Here are the top 5 Node.js monitoring tips that would assist developers in enhancing their app performance.
Top 5 Monitoring Tips to Enhance App Performance
Evaluate Current Profile
Before developers go ahead and attempt to enhance the app performance. They need to measure the current level of performance of the apps. This way, they will be able to figure out the incompetencies. And plan out the appropriate strategy to reach the desired results. Gauging the current performance may require developers to perform tests like Load Testing, Stress Testing, Spike Testing, Scalability Testing, Volume Testing, Endurance testing, and much more. These tests will provide many vital metrics like response time, requests per second, and more. Developers can utilize these insights meticulously to rapidly locate the root cause of a specific issue so that they can address it right away. They can also take proactive measures to increase the app performance.
Reduce Latency through Caching
Cache is a high-speed storage layer that is used as temporary storage for frequently accessed data. It prevents users from retrieving data from the primary source of the data every time a request is made. Instead, it makes the retrieval process much smoother and faster. Server-side caching is one of the most common strategies for enhancing the performance of a web application. If one’s application is receiving a lot of requests for some unchanged data, storing them in a cache will certainly improve the responsiveness of such requests.
Use Timeouts when Dealing with I/O Operations
Timeouts are the maximum wait time set on a request. It represents how long a client is ready to wait for a response from an external service. If the response is not received within the mentioned limit, then the connection will abort to prevent the app from hanging indefinitely. Many popular libraries in Node.js do not set a default timeout. This means that even a remote API can keep your app waiting for the requested resource. To prevent this from happening, developers need to set a request timeout.
Avoid Serving Static Assets
To ensure the optimal performance for Node.js servers, prevent using them to serve static assets like JavaScript, CSS, or image files from your application. As Node.js was not designed to serve static assets, serving assets from the main application would consume considerable resources. The developers can set up a CDN proxy file like Amazon CloudFront to serve static files. This would cache their static content and serve it as close as possible to the end-users. This will free up the Node.js servers which will further enable them to handle only dynamic requests.
Scale with a Load Balancer
If one’s website or app does not receive that many requests, then there is no need to use load balancing. However, when one’s platform starts becoming popular and receives a lot of traffic, the underlying server might not be able to handle the load. Because a single Node.js server is not capable and flexible enough to handle a large amount of traffic, adding more machines can solve this problem. But to share traffic to all of your application servers, a load balancer is required. A load balancer acts as a traffic cop sitting in front of one’s application servers. It routes client requests across multiple servers and is capable of fulfilling those requests in such a way that maximizes speed and capacity utilization. It ensures that no one server is overloaded which could degrade performance in the future.
Conclusion
In this article, we have covered a comprehensive list of practical tips. Tips that will enable Node.js developers to scale their current applications to handle more traffic. It is recommended that before implementing a specific optimization, developers should run performance tests on their system. And utilize their insights to determine what course of action to take. Also, it would be quite helpful for them if they start using monitoring tools. So that they can evaluate the impact of changes and locate regressions quickly and reliably.
