#deployement

Node.js scalability

Node apps essentially run single-threaded, even though file and network events could leverage multiple threads. So, how is production scaling achieved in Node.js?

To take advantage of multi-core systems, Node applications can be run as cluster of Node processes to handle the load. However there are programmatic and runtime ways of managing these clusters.

The node-cluster module is the basic mechanism allowing a master process to spawn worker processes and allowing developer to share a socket across multiple networked Node applications. The master – worker logic is simple, this is achieved using file descriptors and serialisation. When you call server.listen(…) in a worker, it serialises the arguments and passes the request to the master process. If the master process already has a listening server matching the worker’s requirements, then it passes the handle to the worker. If it does not already have a listening server matching that requirement, then it will create one, and pass the handle to the worker.

Primarily Node.js is best used for:

Network applications

Non blocking operations

Dynamic applications

Real-time applications

JSON api server

Ajax heavy applications

Distributed single purpose applications

What are some bad uses of Node.js:

CPU heavy applications

Static html based applications

Large complicated applications

The best use of Node.js is when combined with some other application framework. For example use Node.js as your API server and use C++ for any CPU intensive work. You can even use Node.js as a form of socket server and use other frameworks as your application layer combined with some message queueing systems such as ZeroMQ or Amazon Simple Queue Service or something else.

Node.js deployement

There are a lot of ways to deploy your Node.js application. Amazon web services are one of them. I’ll skip Amazon Web Services introduction and how to launch your virtual machine via Amazon EC2 service.

Install Node.js and NPM

The most effective way is to set up GCC/C++ and compile Node.js for your Amazon Linux distribution. We need to install gcc and openssl for compiling, git to get Node.js source code. 

sudo yum install gcc-c++ make

sudo yum install openssl-devel

sudo yum install git

git clone git://github.com/joyent/node.git

cd node

git checkout vX.Y.Z

./configure make

sudo make install

Running Your Node.js Application in AWS

You simply execute your script on the server the same way you have been executing on your machine. The best way to get the code on the server is simply to use a source control repository (such as github) and clone the code on the server. Just do the following simple commands:

git clone git://github.com/youcompacy/yourproject.git

git checkout master

npm install

node your_app.js