How to run and stop running Artillery.io programmatically? - node.js

I am interested in implementing artillery.io tests, but I want them to run from inside a small server app, that would receive REST calls to start and stop the load on demand. Yet most help information online are focused on CLI-based stand-alone artillery tests.
How can I be able to run and stop artillery workers from inside a program?
Granted, I can run a child process and then dismantle it, but would it be possible to natively control Atrillery via some sort of program API or REST API?

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Electron running multiple main processes vs multiple browser windows

I'm running electron on linux server for web scraping. And currently I'm running new electron command for each task. But it results in high cpu usage. Now thinking about running single electron instance, and create new BrowserWindow for each task. It will take some time to adapt the code base for this style, so I wanted to ask here first. Will it make a difference in cpu usage, and how much?
Basically, creating a new NodeJS process will result in re-parsing your application's code, which will highly affect your CPU usage. Creating only a new BrowserWindow will only create a new renderer process, which is way more efficient.
If your application is packaged, e.g. with electron-packager, then creating a new instance will also affect your CPU usage like creating another NodeJS process, because that packaged (aka compiled) application has a copy of NodeJS in it, which is enough to run your code, but still affects the CPU usage.
But the decision depends on how you use the server. If you only run the Electron application to carry out the tasks that have been defined by you, adapting your working code would have no to only a low benefit. If you want to release this application and/or that server is used by some other tasks, e.g. a web server, it would be a real benefit if you adapt your code.
Running multiple instances of the main nodejs process with the default configuration is not actually supported or tested. You'll find that any features that persists data to disk either don't work, or don't work as expected (ie. localstorage, indexeddb, sessions, etc).
https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/2493
You can work around this by changing the data directory for each instance so they don't trample over each other but this is likely to use a lot of disk space and you'd need a way to keep track of all these data directories.
A single main process with multiple renderers is nearly always the answer.

How to prioritize express requests/responds over other intensive server related tasks

My node application currently has two main modules:
a scraper module
an express server
The former is very server intensive task which indefinately runs in a loop. It scrapes information from over more than 100 urls, crunches the data and puts it into a mongodb database (using mongoose). This process runs over and over and over. :P
The latter part, my express server, responds to http/socket get requests and returns the crunched data which was written to the db by the scraper to the requesting client.
I'd like to optimize the performance of my server so that the express requests and responds get prioritized over the server intensive task(s). A client should be able to get the requested data asap, without having the scraper eat up all of my server resources.
I though about putting the server intensive task or the express server into its own thread, but then I stumbled upon cluster, and child processes; and now I'm totally confused which approach would be the right one for my situation.
One of the benefits I'm having is that there is a clear seperation between the writing part of my application and the reading part. The scraper writes stuff to the db, express reads from the db (no post/put/delete/...) calls are exposed. So, I -guess- I won't run into threading problems with different threads trying to write to the same db.
Any good suggestions? Thanks in advance!
Resources like cpu and memory required by processes are managed by the operative system. You should not waste your time writing that logic within your source code.
I think you should look at the problem from outside your source code files. Once they ran they are processes. Processes are managed, as I said, by the OS.
Firstly I would split that on two separate commands.
One being the scraper module (eg npm run scraper, that runs something like node scraper.js).
The other one being your express server (eg npm start, that runs something like node server.js).
This approach will let you configure that within your OS or your cluster.
A rapid approach for that will be to use docker.
With two docker containers running your projects with cpu usage limitations. This is fairly easy to do and does not require for you to lift a new server... and at the same time it provides the
isolation level you need to scale it to many servers in the future.
Steps to do this:
Learn a little about docker and docker compose and install them in your server
Build a docker image for your application (you can upload it to a free private image that docker hub gives you for free)
Build a docker compose for your two services using that image, with the cpu configuration you need (you can set both cpu and memory limits easily)
An alternative to that would be running the two commands (npm run scraper and npm start) with some tool like cpulimit, nice/niceness and ionice, or something else like namespaces and cgroups manually (but docker does that for you).
PD: Also, I would recommend to rethink your backend process. Maybe it's better to run it every 12 hours or something like that, instead of all the time, and you may run it from within cron instead of a loop.

Monitor node.js scripts running on ubuntu instance

I have a node.js script that run once in a day on ubuntu EC2 instance. This script pulls data from some hundered thousand remote APIs and save to our local database. Is there any way we can monitor this node.js script on remote server? There have been few instances where script crashed due to some reason and we were unable to figure it out without SSHing into instance and checking the logs. I have however created a small system after first few crashes which send us an email whenever script crashes due to some uncaught exception and also when script completes execution.
However, we need to develop a better system where we can monitor the progress of script via web interface of our admin application which is deployed over some other instance and also trigger start/stop of script via this interface. What are possible options for achieving this?
If you like to stay in Node.js, then there are several process monitoring tools:
PM2 comes with lots of other features besides monitoring processes. You can monitor your processes via CLI or their official web interface: https://keymetrics.io/. A quick search on npm also gives a bunch of nice unofficial gui tools: https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=pm2+web
Forever is not as feature rich as PM2 but will do the basic process operations and couple of gui are also available in npm.
There are two problems here that you are trying to solve:
Scheduling work to be done
Monitoring a process for failure
At a simple level, this is easy: schedule a cron job and restart failed things so they keep trying.
However, when things don't go smoothly, it helps to have a lot more granularity over what you are scheduling, and how it is executed. This would also give you the visibility over each little piece of work.
Adding a little more complexity, you can end up with something like this:
Schedule the script that starts everything (via cron, if that's comfortable)
That script generates several jobs that need to be executed into a queue
A worker process (or n worker processes) consume that queue and execute pending jobs
You can monitor both the progress of the jobs, as well as the state of each worker (# of crashes, failures, jobs completed, etc.). The other tools mentioned above are good candidates for this (forever, pm2, etc.)
When jobs fail, other workers can pick up the small piece of work that was in progress and restart it. This is much more efficient than restarting the entire process, and also lets you parallelize things across n workers based on how you can split up the workloads.
You could easily throw the status onto a web app so you can check in periodically rather than have to dig through server logs.
You can also get more intelligent with different types of failures. Network error? Retry 5 times. Rated limited? Gradual back-off. Crash? Don't retry and notify via email. etc
I have tried this with pm2, you can get the info of the task, then cat out or grab the log files. Or you could have a logging server, see also: https://github.com/papertrail/remote_syslog2

Best approach to deploy and run node servers on production machines?

I am using Webrtc, nodejs, Expressjs as the framework to create a audio, video and chat application. I have used Forever so that the script runs continuously.
As my application deals with audio, video and chat. User presence plays an important role. We need to have the system up and running always and avoid system crashes and restart. If it happens we are going to loose all information regarding the users who were online.
Need Suggestions what are the best approaches to avoid such situations.
Also, while moving new features to the production server, what steps should we take into consideration so that the application doesn't stop and henceforth we don't loose user information.
What if the server went down or we had to make it down. What are the different techniques that can be used so that we don't loose the presence information of the online users in the system and restore them back(if necessary).
1) use node cluster to fork multiple process per core. So if one process died, another process will be auto boot up. Check out: http://nodejs.org/api/cluster.html
2) use domain to catch asyn operation instead of using try-catch or uncaught http://nodejs.org/api/domain.html. I'm not saying that try-catch or uncaught is bad thought!
3) use forever/supervisor to monitor your services
4) add daemon to run your node app: http://upstart.ubuntu.com
hope this helps!
I also answered at this post: How do I prevent node.js from crashing? try-catch doesn't work

How do you monitor another application until it closes?

Suppose there are two executables. One is mine and the other is some other application. Now if the other app is running, I want my app to run until the other one exits or is stopped.
Writing a separate service seems quite an overkill.
You can first obtain a Process object - say by Process.GetProcessesByName, or better - use the ProcessID of the process you wish to monitor, if you have it. You can then try obtaining a WaitHandle from it, as discussed e.g. here, then call WaitOne on it (or WaitAll, if you're monitoring several instances).
Write a windows service that will continuously monitor the other application executable. If the service finds it running it will start your executable if not running and make sure it keeps running throughout the life cycle of the other application. As soon as the other app terminates, your windows service will also terminate your exe.

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