Node and ARM
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Node and ARM
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Re: Node and ARM
#2> Node’s development model encourages developers to think multi-process from the beginning because we know that without the crutch of threads, the only way we can scale our applications is to multiply the number of processes
>This means that Node applications scale as easily across clusters of servers as they do within a single server.
Yeah, the loss of efficiency that occurs by starting up an entirely separate V8 VM on the same machine is equal to starting one on two separate machines... But how is that a plus? Especially if you want to start more than one thread on a machine.
Also, that part had nothing to do with Node. Perhaps Node may be optimized for ARM, but that really isn't informative in how it performs compared against (say) Java on the same platform. Java's optimized for ARM, too...
Re: Node and ARM
#3The arguments against jvm vs node I'm not buying. You don't automatically get scalability for free with node any more than any other platform. If anything the JVM has been further optimized, particularly for servers, for years over v8. You also don't see ram helping node not because node is so much more efficient -- it's because the design of the v8 limits how much ram it can use.
I'm not sure even why it serves to try and make this comparison if you're talking about node running well on modern arm processors.
There are a number of arm hosts out there now, but none seem to have caught on big. Perhaps in a generation of processor or two someone like aws will start to offer it and there might be a plausible shift.
Re: Node and ARM
#4> While the JVM is right at the heart of the monolithic software stack and the tooling that surrounds it, Node, or server-side JavaScript, is arguably at the heart of the new SOA stack.
I love developing with node.js, but this doesn't sound right at all.
Re: Node and ARM
#5The arguments against jvm vs node I'm not buying. You don't automatically get scalability for free with node any more than any other platform. If anything the JVM has been further optimized, particularly for servers, for years over v8. You also don't see ram helping node not because node is so much more efficient -- it's because the design of the v8 limits how much ram it can use. I'm not sure even why it serves to t…
The only real advantage to node is that it doesn't have all the "enterprise" baggage: the apps people build with it are a lot smaller and a lot more decoupled.
Re: Node and ARM
#6What exactly do they mean by "multi-process" in the context of an event loop like Node? I'm also not sure about their claims concerning clustering - Node has no SMP capabilities, nor is there any real mechanism for enabling location transparency out of the box.
It's also interesting to note the conflict between the microservices and monolithic application camps. Both are just as adamant that theirs is the future and the other is awful. I'm sympathetic to KISS personally, but is there any real consensus forming?
Re: Node and ARM
#7Smaller ARM servers are an interesting trend, see https://www.scaleway.com/
Re: Node and ARM
#8"Node is nimble; for example, we advise our clients to kill & quickly restart when their applications enter an unexpected-error state. You can’t do this with a runtime that takes minutes to properly start and warm-up."
Hmmm. I'm running tiddlywiki (node.js app) on an ARM, and it probably takes a good ~30 seconds to start up.. Not good for an application that weighs in at 20k lines of code, 3/4 of which isn't even javascript. Worse yet, it has noticeable delays during operation, including about a 15 second delay if it hasn't been accessed in a few hours. I might blame it on a big dataset, but frankly it has less than a 100 tiddlers, and everthing is hosted on a SSD. This on a machine that generally is quite responsive, and capable (although its about 1/5 as fast as my desktop in some benchmarks I ran). It sure doesn't take that long to start apache/php on the same machine and start serving pages.
Re: Node and ARM
#9I've been using Node.js/io.js on ARM for a number of projects and have been pretty happy with it. For example using a cheap development board to create a build status light: https://github.com/tantalic/build-light. I'm just starting a new project where I am going to give Go a try for ARM development which I suspect may give even better results.
Re: Node and ARM
#10The arguments against jvm vs node I'm not buying. You don't automatically get scalability for free with node any more than any other platform. If anything the JVM has been further optimized, particularly for servers, for years over v8. You also don't see ram helping node not because node is so much more efficient -- it's because the design of the v8 limits how much ram it can use. I'm not sure even why it serves to t…
The only real advantage to node is that it doesn't have all the "enterprise" baggage: the apps people build with it are a lot smaller and a lot more decoupled.
That baggage is concentrated in one particular JVM language and is largely self-imposed. I write NLP software in Java without resorting to the AbstractFactoryFactory nonsense prevalent in the enterprise world.