Request sent is taking too long. why would that be? - node.js

"Request sent" is taking nearly 3+ seconds.
client code:
JQ.ajax({
url: '/test',
type: 'POST',
contentType: 'application/json',
data: JSONdata,
success: function(response) {
console.log('done');
}
});
server code:
app.post('/test', function(req, res){
res.send(req.body)
});
dataLength is 865853 ( as seen from headers )
server is running Nginx behind which NodeJS server is running.
Want to understand why this is happening and ways to reduce it.
Its a post request. adding the headers image:

Request sent is taking too long. why would that be?
It could be anything.
Want to understand why this is happening and ways to reduce it.
There may be lots of reasons. Without seeing even a single line of your code it's impossible to tell you what's wrong with it. You may be using blocking functions, you may be calling external services, you may do too much work in the main process, you may be blocking the event loop, you may forget to handle errors, you may be doing a number of things wrong in your application and you may have misconfigured your reverse proxy, you may be using wrong ports, wrong hosts, the network may be slow, routers may be overloaded, packets may be lost, you can have memory leaks, swap trashing, CPU maxed out etc.

Related

what happens if neither res.send() nor res.end() is called in express.js?

I have a security issue that someone is trying to call random APIs that are not supported on our server but are frequently used for administrators API in general. and I set this code below to handle 404 to not respond to this attack
url-not-found-handler.js
'use strict';
module.exports = function () {
//4XX - URLs not found
return ((req, res, next) => {
});
};
what happens to client is that it waits until the server responds but I want to know if this will affect the performance of my express.js server also what happens behind the scene in the server without res.send() or res.end() ?
According to the documentation of res.end().
Ends the response process. This method actually comes from Node core,
specifically the response.end() method of http.ServerResponse.
And then response.end
This method signals to the server that all of the response headers and
body have been sent; that server should consider this message
complete. The method, response.end(), MUST be called on each response.
If you leave your request hanging, the httpserver will surely keep data about it. Which means that if you let hang many requests, your memory will grow and reduce your server performance.
About the client, he's going to have to wait until he got a request timeout.
The best to do having a bad request is to immediately reject the request, which is freeing the memory allowed for the request.
You cannot prevent bad requests (maybe have a firewall blocking requests from certains IP address?). Best you can do is to handle them as fast as possible.

Node one async call slows another in parallel

For over a year we've seen interesting patterns that don't always rear themselves but on occasion repeat and we've never been able to figure out why and I'm hoping someone can make sense of it. It may be our approach, it may be the environment (node 8.x & koa), it may be a number of things.
We make two async calls in parallel to our dependencies using the request-promise module.
Simplified code of a single api dependency:
const httpRequest = require("request-promise");
module.exports = function (url) {
const requestOptions = {
uri: ...,
json: true,
resolveWithFullResponse: true
}
return httpRequest(requestOptions)
.then(response => {
status = response.statusCode;
tmDiff = moment().diff(tmStart);
return createResponseObject({
status,
payload: response.body,
})
})
.catch(err => { .... };
});
};
Parallel calls:
const apiResponses = yield {
api1: foo(ctx, route),
api2: bar(ctx)
};
Yet we've seen situations in our response time charts where if 1 is slow, latency seems to follow the other separate service. It doesn't matter what services they are, the pattern has been noticed across > 5 services that may be called in parallel. Does anyone have any ideas what could be causing the supposed latency?
If the latency is caused by a temporarily slowed network connection, then it would be logical to expect both parallel requests to feel that same effect. ping or tracert during the slowdown might give you useful diagnostics to see if it's a general transport issue. If your node.js server (which runs Javascript single threaded) was momentarily busy doing something else with the CPU (serving another request, garbage collecting, etc...), then that would affect the apparent responsiveness of API calls just because it took a moment for node.js to get around to processing the waiting responses.
There are tools that monitor the responsiveness of your own http server on a continual basis (you can set whatever monitoring interval you want). If you have a CPU-hog somewhere, those tools would show a similar lag in responsiveness. There are also tools that monitor the health of your network connection which would also show a connectivity glitch. These are the types of monitoring tools that people whose job it is to maintain a healthy server farm might use. I don't have a name handy for either one, but you can presumably find such tools by searching.

Node.js http GET request takes substantially longer than browser, REST client, et al

I am try to make a simple GET request in Node.js and the request takes 3-5 seconds to resolve whereas the same request in a browser or REST client takes ~400ms. The server to which I am making the request is controlled by our server team, but before I bother them with request/resource monitoring, I was going to ping the community to see if there were any "hey, check this setting first" kind of tips you guys could offer.
The code essentially forwards incoming requests to our server:
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
http.request({
host: "our.private.host",
port: 8080,
path: req.url,
headers: req.headers
}, function () {
res.end("DONE: " + Date.now());
}).end();
}).listen(8001);
I open my browser and type in the following URL:
http://localhost:8001/path/to/some/resource
... which gets forwarded on to the final destination:
http://our.private.host:8080/path/to/some/resource
Everything is working fine and I am getting the response I want, but it takes 3-5 seconds to resolve. If I paste the final destination URL directly in the browser or a REST client, it resolves quickly. I don't know much about our server, unfortunately - but I am looking more for node tips at this point. Note, the request pool isn't maxed out as I am only making 1 request at a time from my local machine.
The first step is gather some info on where the request is taking its time by looking at the exact timing of the network activity on your node server. You can do that by getting a tool that watches all network activity. I personally use Fiddler, but I know that WireShark is popular too.
Once that tools is installed and active, you can then see how long all these various steps in the process of your request are taking:
DNS request to resolve target IP address
Time to connect to the target server
Time to send the http request
Time to receive the http request
Time to send response back to original request
Understanding which of these operations is much longer than expected will give you an idea where to look further for the problem.
FYI, there are pre-built tools such as nginx that can do this type of proxying by just setting some values in a configuration file without any custom coding.

“Proxying” a lot of HTTP requests with Node.js + Express 2

I'm writing proxy in Node.js + Express 2. Proxy should:
decrypt POST payload and issue HTTP request to server based on result;
encrypt reply from server and send it back to client.
Encryption-related part works fine. The problem I'm facing is timeouts. Proxy should process requests in less than 15 secs. And most of them are under 500ms, actually.
Problem appears when I increase number of parallel requests. Most requests are completed ok, but some are failed after 15 secs + couple of millis. ab -n5000 -c300 works fine, but with concurrency of 500 it fails for some requests with timeout.
I could only speculate, but it seems thant problem is an order of callbacks exectuion. Is it possible that requests that comes first are hanging until ETIMEDOUT because of node's focus in latest ones which are still being processed in time under 500ms.
P.S.: There is no problem with remote server. I'm using request for interactions with it.
upd
The way things works with some code:
function queryRemote(req, res) {
var options = {}; // built based on req object (URI, body, authorization, etc.)
request(options, function(err, httpResponse, body) {
return err ? send500(req, res)
: res.end(encrypt(body));
});
}
app.use(myBodyParser); // reads hex string in payload
// and calls next() on 'end' event
app.post('/', [checkHeaders, // check Content-Type and Authorization headers
authUser, // query DB and call next()
parseRequest], // decrypt payload, parse JSON, call next()
function(req, res) {
req.socket.setTimeout(TIMEOUT);
queryRemote(req, res);
});
My problem is following: when ab issuing, let's say, 20 POSTs to /, express route handler gets called like thousands of times. That's not always happening, sometimes 20 and only 20 requests are processed in timely fashion.
Of course, ab is not a problem. I'm 100% sure that only 20 requests sent by ab. But route handler gets called multiple times.
I can't find reasons for such behaviour, any advice?
Timeouts were caused by using http.globalAgent which by default can process up to 5 concurrent requests to one host:port (which isn't enough in my case).
Thouthands of requests (instead of tens) were sent by ab (Wireshark approved fact under OS X; I can not reproduce this under Ubuntu inside Parallels).
You can have a look at node-http-proxy module and how it handles the connections. Make sure you don't buffer any data and everything works by streaming. And you should try to see where is the time spent for those long requests. Try instrumenting parts of your code with conosle.time and console.timeEnd and see where is taking the most time. If the time is mostly spent in javascript you should try to profile it. Basically you can use v8 profiler, by adding --prof option to your node command. Which makes a v8.log and can be processed via a v8 tool found in node-source-dir/deps/v8/tools. It only works if you have installed d8 shell via scons(scons d8). You can have a look at this article to help you further to make this working.
You can also use node-webkit-agent which uses webkit developer tools to show the profiler result. You can also have a look at my fork with a bit of sugar.
If that didn't work, you can try profiling with dtrace(only works in illumos-based systems like SmartOS).

Node.js API choking with concurrent connections

This is the first time I've used Node.js and Mongo, so please excuse any ignorance. I come from a PHP background. It was my understanding that Node.js scaled well because of the event-driven nature of it. As such, I built my API in node and have been testing it on a localhost. Today, I deployed it to my cloud server and everything works great, except...
As the requests start to pile up, they start to take a long time to fulfill. With just 2 clients connecting to the API, already I'm seeing 30sec+ page load times when both clients are trying to make several requests at once (which does sometimes happen).
Most of the work done by the API is either (a) reading/writing to MongoDB, which resides on a 2nd server on the cloud (b) making requests to other APIs, websites, etc. and returning the results. Both of these operations should not be blocking, but I can imagine the problem being something to do with a bottleneck either on the Mongo DB server (a) or to the external APIs (b).
Of course, I will have multiple application servers in the end, but I would expect each one to handle more than a couple concurrent clients without choking.
Some considerations:
1) I have some console.logs that I left in my node code, and I have a SSH client open to monitor the cloud server. I suspect that this could cause slowdown
2) I use express, mongoose, Q, request, and a handful of other modules
Thanks for taking the time to help a node newb ;)
Edit: added some pics of performance graphs after some responses below...
EDIT: here's a typical callback -- it is called by the express router, and it uses the Q module and OAuth to make a Post API call to Facebook:
post: function(req, links, images, callback)
{
// removed some code that calculates the target (string) and params (obj) variables
// the this.request function is a simple wrapper around the oauth.getProtectedResource function
Q.ncall(this.request, this, target, 'POST', params)
.then(function(res){
callback(null, res);
})
.fail(callback).end();
},
EDIT: some "upsert" code
upsert: function(query, callback)
{
var id = this.data._id,
upsertData = this.data.toObject(),
query = query || {'_id': id};
delete upsertData._id;
this.model.update(query, upsertData, {'upsert': true}, function(err, res, out){
if(err)
{
if(callback) callback(new Errors.Database({'message':'the data could not be upserted','error':err, 'search': query}));
return;
}
if(callback) callback(null);
});
},
Admittedly, my knowledge of Q/promises is weak. But, I think I have consistently implemented them in a way that does not block...
Your question has provided half of the relevant data: the technology stack. However, when debugging performance issues, you also need the other half of the data: performance metrics.
You're running some "cloud servers", but it's not clear what these servers are actually doing. Are they spiked on CPU? on Memory? on IO?
There are lots of potential issues. Are you running Express in production mode? Are you taking up too much IO on your MongoDB server? Are you legitimately downloading too much data? Did you get caught in an infinite Node.JS loop? (it happens)
I would like to provide better advice, but without knowing the status of the servers involved it's really impossible to start picking at any specific underlying technology. You may be a "Node newb", but basic server monitoring is pretty standard across programming languages.
Thank you for the extra details, I will re-iterate the most important part of my comments above: Where are these servers blocked?
CPU? (clearly not from your graph)
Memory? (doesn't seem likely here)
IO? (where are the IO graphs, what is your DB server doing?)

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