Where to host my NodeJS powered socket.io API? - node.js

I'm currently working on an api for an app that I'm developing, which I don't want to tell too much about. I'm a solo dev with no patents so it's probably a good idea to keep it anonymous. It uses socket.io together with node.js to interact with clients and the other way around, which I might be swapping out sometime later for elixir and it's sockets, but that isn't relevant for now. Now I'm trying to look into cloud hosting, but I'm having a rough time finding a good service to use.
These are my requirements:
24/7 uptime
Low memory and performance necessary (at least to start with). About 1+ gig with 2+ cores will most likely suffice (need 2 threads or more for node to handle async programming well)
Preferably free for like maybe even a year, or just really cheap, but that might be munch to ask
Must somehow be able to run some sort of database. Haven't really settled on this yet, but I want to implement a custom currency at some point, and probably have the ability to add some cooldowns. So it can be fairly simple and small. If anybody has any tips on what database I should use, that would also be very welcome. I was thinking of Cassandra because of the blazing fast performance and expandability. But I also wanna look into remote databases, especially if I'm gonna go international with the product
Ability to keep open socket.io connections, as you've probably guessed :P
Low ping decently high bandwith internet. The socket.io connections are lightweight and not a lot of data has to be sent. Mostly packets of a few kilobytes every now and then for all of the clients.
If this information is too vague or you want to know some other requirements I haven't thought of, let me know.

Check out Heroku (PaaS), they have a free version to start with

Related

Node.js - I need to know my resource usage before deploying to google cloud

EDIT: STILL NOT ANSWERED. I appreciate the advice I have received so far, but I still have not found a proper way to test the amount of resources my server is using. I decided to use GCE instead of GAE but I still want to measure the resource usage.
I have searched all over google as well as SA and can't seem to figure this one out.
I would like to deploy my (very small) node.js server to either Google App Engine or Google Compute Engine (not sure which to use yet).
I see that they charge based on how many resources you use, but how can I check this before I make my decision? Basically what I would like to do is find a way to analyse my server and see what CPU/DISK/NETWORK/RAM/Etc it uses, and then possibly make some refinements to my code to get the usage down as low as possible.
I am a hobbyist programmer and this server is just for personal stuff so I don't need anything fancy. I just want to get it hosted on google and not my home server. My real fear is that, since I am not a professional, my code might be doing some crazy background stuff repeatedly that would rack my usage up for nothing.
Quick rundown on what my server does:
Basic node.js express template that IntelliJ made me, then I added my code to sit and listen to a Firebase. When the firebase gets a message (once or twice a day maybe, text message equivalent size) the server sends a quick GCM/FCM message to a few devices. Extremely simple server, very little code. Nothing crazy.
As a little bonus for me, if you have a suggestion as to which platform I should use, I am all-ears.
If you do not need this server to run 24x7, use App Engine. It stops an instance if it is not being used for 15 minutes. The startup time for new instances depends on your code, but for Node.js instances it should not be long.
Generally speaking it is easier to run an app on App Engine than Compute Engine, but if you use a single instance and don't change code often the difference is negligible.
App Engine has a generous free quota. You may end up paying nothing until the usage gets over a certain threshold.
You can run some diagnostic tools on your existing server, but even then you will get an approximation - a server with a different combination of resources sitting on a different network may use resources differently. You may be able to get a rather accurate estimate of memory usage, though.
If this is a small app with not too many users, even a small instance should be able to handle it. There is no harm in trying - start with the smallest instance, test, go to the next instance up if tests fail. Your key concern should be to have enough memory to handle a small number of requests.
As for the number of requests your server can handle, you can configure automatic scaling. It is a default option in App Engine and can be enabled for flexible runtime. Then you can have the smallest instance (i.e. your server does not crash due to the lack of memory) running, and another instance will be added if and when that small instance is not enough.
Well, after over a month I figure I might as well answer this myself.
What I ended up doing was creating a basic instance on Computer Engine (the micro. Smallest one available) and letting it just sit there for a few weeks. I looked back at the data to see what some good baselines were and took note.
Then I took my server code and ran it on the server. I left if there for a few days, changed it, updated it, etc. Just tried to simulate the things I would be doing. Sent messages on my client app (that's what this server is doing after all is said and done) and I let this go on for a few more weeks.
The rest is history. I looked at the baseline then looked at my new memory, CPU, network and disk usage and there we go. Good to go. My free trial still isn't even over so it was a free experiment.
The good news is that my server is more 'lightweight' than I thought.

How much hosting RAM does a webRTC app require?

I will be hosting a webrtc application. All the server needs to do is just pass around messages like room number, ice candidates, disconnects, etc, just all those messages for signalling. I am using socket.io and node.js.
The server pretty much just passes text around. There is no sign ups, no database, it's all in memory. It keeps track of a list of users that are online (just how many are online), and list of rooms that are taken.
So a few lists of numbers, and it passes text between users so that they can connect via webrtc.
Now, obviously when (if) I get a huge amount of traffic coming in, the lists might get kind of big, like maybe 10k-20k 5 digit numbers in each list (there are only a couple big lists).
And all that passing around, like the disconnect and connect. I need a server that can do this stuff fast, perferably a free server. I mean, it's only text, so it shouldn't be that big of a deal, right? But my app is structured around connecting a person to the next person who connects. So, if a whole bunch of people connect at around the same second, then I need a quick hosting server that can handle that to the milisecond... Will this even be a problem?
What exactly should I be looking for in a server, if I'm just using memory for number lists (no databases), and passing around text stuff.
First of all, this doesn't have anything to do with webrtc itself. What you basically want is a chat-server, a server that sends data from one client to the other.
Second, the type of server is irrelevant to the amount of RAM required to run it. What matters is how much clients you will have concurrently. (to some extent, game servers will obviously consume more RAM even without clients).
Third, more RAM does NOT mean faster handling. That is, if you don't fully use the available RAM, adding more won't do you any good. Obviously, when you exceed the available RAM things start to slow down a lot. Read more about it here
Now, with those out of the way, let's see what you need. You can make a very rough estimation by connecting a few clients to a server and see how much RAM it uses. Check if the amount of RAM goes up if these clients start calling each other and by how much it goes up. You now have a minimum and a maximum amount of RAM for x clients. I would do this test with about 10 clients.
Now that you can make an estimation, calculate how much the minimum and maximum RAM is for your expected userbase. It will become more and more a preference thing from here on out, but I would at least double that amount and then round up to the nearest amount of RAM that "makes sense" (14.7GB becomes 16GB, 28.32GB becomes 32GB etc...)
I will add, from my own experience with webrtc with about 1000-1500 concurrent users that 8GB is easily enough. But it's really up to the amount of users you expect.
On a side node, I very much recommend nodejs for a server. It's super easy to use, any programmer that knows javascript (so basically any programmer) can create a chat-server in nodejs in a day or two. Take a look at this open-source webrtc server in nodejs

high performance tcp server in Node.js?

I've seen many good tcp-based projects in other languages, for example C/C++.
Is there any good one in Node.js? I'm implementing a tcp-based real-time pub/sub system using Node.js, but have some problems when high pressure.
I don't really need those simple tcp server examples or baby-steps tutorials. I need some real projects.
Thanks!
EDIT:
I write a chat-like node.js program to exchange data from clients. It's pretty good when I test it with only few people.
However, when more people, like hundreds people, join in, it starts to loss data. Check out this: How to deal with 'read ETIMEDOUT' in Node.js?.
The answer is good but cannot help on improving the stability.
I don't really expect people who dive into my dirty codes to find my errors. That's why I want some real projects to see how they do.
I believe this reading material might help you.
In his case, he was broadcasting mouse events to several clients. And the amount of data to publish was so great that he had to cluster users by "rooms"

Using Nodejs for writing a web application

I am considering developing a web site which has many characteristics of a social networking site. The website, I am considering will have a lot of apps, which will interact with the database, and also, scraping other websites for information and a multiuser chat. Also, it will feature a forum, blog, and other similar CRUD applications. The key things I am looking at is
Response time
Max number of developers may be 1 to 3 during the initial stages
I expect the website to scale up to around 1000 concurrent users in a year, and then hopefully an exponential growth.
The users are expected to spend a lot of time, in the site.
With this requirements in mind, I looked at Django, and Web2Py, since I am knowledgable in Python. It fits the bill mostly, but, I am concerned about the scalability, and as it scales, I will require more servers to be added. This means, additional cost, and I don't have any ideas to monetize the app in the near future for various reasons. So, I have to be satisfied with a limited amount of resources.
Can you kindly advice me?
Thx
Ik
From what you had described, Node.js is perfect. Not only does it have a low memory footprint and can it handle thousands of concurrent clients out of the box, but you can definitely use it for scraping websites (see this and this), creating chats (check nodechat and this other nice tutorial)
The respond time depends on your application, but if you code the right way (don't block the event loop of Node.js, keep you 'heavy-lifting' outside the server process) Node.js is really fast.
This depends on you, but consider Node.js is JavaScript on the server-side, so there is already a great pool of developers that already know JS and could learn Node.js specific things fast.
There were some official benchmarks on the nodejs blog some weeks ago, look here: http://blog.nodejs.org/2011/11/05/node-v0-6-0/ A simple server with Node.js can handle 5-6 thousands of requests per second, so you can imagine that's really something.
Spending a lot of time on the site means that they'll be making many requests, so look at my point above 3).
http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/2/22/is-nodejs-becoming-a-part-of-the-stack-simplegeo-says-yes.html
Scaling node.js

What are good ways to create real-time stats for high-load webservers?

Say I have a bunch of webservers each serving 100's of requests/s, and I want to see real time stats like:
Request rate over last 5s, 60s, 5 min etc
Number of unique users seen again per time window
Or in general for a bunch of timestamped events, I want to see real-time derived statistics - what's the best way to go about it?
I've considered having each GET request update a global counter somewhere, then sampling that at various intervals, but at the event rates I'm seeing it's hard to get a distributed counter that's fast enough.
Any ideas welcome!
Added: Servers are Linux running Apache/mod_wsgi, with a Python (Django) stack.
Added: To give a sense of the event rates I want to track stats for, they're coming in at over 10K events/s. Even incrementing a distributed counter at that rate is a challenge.
You might like to help us try out the beta of our agent for application performance monitoring in Python web applications.
http://newrelic.com
It delves more into the application performance rather than just the web server, but since any bottlenecks aren't generate going to be the web server, but your application then that is going to be more useful anyway.
Disclaimer. I work for New Relic and this is the project I am working on. It is a paid product, but the beta means it is free for now with all features. Later when that changes, if you didn't want to pay for it, their is still a Lite subscription level which is free and which gives you basic web metrics reporting which still covers some of what you are after. Anyway, right now would be a great opportunity to make use of it to debug your performance while you can.
Virtually all good servers provide this kind of functionality out of the box. For example, Apache has the mod_status module and Glassfish supports JMX. Furthermore, there are many commercial packages for monitoring clusters, such as Hyperic and Zenoss.
What web or application server are you using? It is difficult to provide a solution without that information.
Look at using WebSockets, their overhead is much smaller than a HTTP request, they are very well suited to real-time web applications. See: http://nodeknockout.com/ for Node based websocket examples.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSocket
You will need to run a daemon if you want to run it on your apache server.
Also take a look at:
http://kaazing.com/ if you wan't less hassle, but are willing to fork out some cash.
On the Windows side, Perfmonance monitor is the tool you should investigate.
As Jared O'Connor said, you should precise what kind of web server you want to monitor.

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