I'm fairly new and just getting to know node.js (background as PHP developer). I've seen some nodeJs examples and the video on nodejs website.
Currently I'm running a video site and in the background a lot of tasks have to be executed. Currently this is done by cronjobs that call php scripts. The downsite of this approach is when an other process is started when the previous is still working you get a high load on the servers etc.
The jobs that needs to be done on the server are the following:
Scrape feeds from websites and insert them in mysql database
Fetch data from websites (scraping) (upon request)
Generate data for reporting. These are mostly mysql queries that need to be executed.
Tasks that need to be done in the future
Log video views (when a user visits a video page) (this will also be logged to mysql)
Log visitors in general
Show ads based on searched video
I want to be able to call an url so that a job can be queued and also be able to schedule jobs by time or they can run constantly.
I don't know if node.js is the path to follow that's why I'm asking it here. What are the advantages of doing this in node? The downsites?
What are the pro's here with node.js?
Thanks for the response!
While traditionally used for web/network tasks (web servers, IRC chat servers, etc.), Node.js shines when you give it any kind of IO bound (as opposed to CPU bound) task, since it uses completely asynchronous IO (that is, all IO happens outside of the main event loop). For example, Node can easily hold open many sockets, waiting for data on each, or stream data to and from files very efficiently.
It really sounds like you're just looking for a job queue; a popular one is Resque, and though it's written for Ruby, there are versions for PHP, Node.js, and more. There are also job queues built specifically for PHP; if you want to stick to PHP, a Google search for "PHP job queue" make take you far.
Now, one advantage to using Node.js is, again, its ability to handle a lot of IO very easily. Of course I'm just guessing, but based on your requirements, it could be a good tool for the job:
Scrape data/feeds from websites - mostly waiting on network IO
Insert data into MySQL - mostly waiting on network IO
Reporting - again, Node is good at MySQL queries, but probably not so good at analyzing data
Call a URL to schedule a job - Node's built-in HTTP handling and excellent web libraries make this a cinch
So it's entirely possible you may want to experiment with Node for these tasks. If you do, take a look at Resque for Node or another job system like Kue. It's also not very hard to build your own, if you don't need something complicated--Redis is a good tool for this.
There are a few reasons you might not want to use Node. If you're not familiar with JavaScript and evented and continuation-passing style programming, Node.js may have a bit of a learning curve, as you have to force yourself to stop thinking synchronously. Furthermore, if you do have a lot of heavy non-IO tasks in your program, such as analyzing data, Node will not excel as those calculations will block the main event loop and keep Node from handling callbacks, etc. for your asynchronous IO. Finally, if you have a lot of logic already in PHP or another language, it may be easier and/or quicker to find a solution in your language of choice.
I second the above answers. You don't necessarily need a full-service job queue, however: you can use flow-control modules like async to run tasks in parallel or series, as fast as they'll go or with controlled concurrency.
Node.js has many powerful scraping/parsing tools. This post mentions a few; I just heard about Trumpet recently; there are probably dozens of options. Node.js has a Stream module in core and Request makes HTTP interactions extremely easy.
For timed tasks, the simplest approach is a basic setTimeout/setInterval. Or you could write the scraper as a script that's called on cron. Or have it triggered on some event using the EventEmitter module in core. etc...
Uncontrolled amount of node js parallel jobs may lay down your server. You will need to control processes or in better way put them in queue for each task
For this needs and if you know php I suggest to use gearman and add jobs by needs or by small php scripts
Related
I am writing payroll management web application in nodejs for my organisation. In many cases application shall involve cpu intensive mathematical calculation for calculating the figures and that too with many users trying to do this simulatenously.
If i plainly write the logic (setting aside the fact that i already did my best from algorithm and data structure point of view to contain the complexity) it will run synchronously blocking the event loop and make request, response slow.
How to resolve this scenario? What are the possible options to do this asynchronously? I also want to mention that this calculation stuff can be let to run in the background and later i can choose to tell user via notification about the status. I have searched for the solution all over this places and i found some solutions but only in theory & i haven't tested them all by implementing. Mentioning below:
Clustering the node server
Use worker threads
Use an alternate server and do some load balancing.
Use a message queue and couple it with worker thread to do backgound tasks.
Can someone suggest me some tried and battle tested advice on this scenario? and also some tutorial links associated with that.
You might wanna try web workers,easy to use and documented.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Workers_API/Using_web_workers
I have a Node.js app with a small set of users that is currently architected with a single web process. I'm thinking about adding an after save trigger that will get called when a record is added to one of my tables. When that after save trigger is executed, I want to perform a large number of IO operations to external APIs. The number of IO operations depends on the number of elements in an array column on the record. Thus, I could be performing a large number of asynchronous operations after each record is saved in this particular table.
I thought about moving this work to a background job as suggested in Worker Dynos, Background Jobs and Queueing. The article gives as a rule of thumb that tasks that take longer than 500 ms be moved to background job. However, after working through the example using RabbitMQ (Asynchronous Web-Worker Model Using RabbitMQ in Node), I'm not convinced that it's worth the time to set everything up.
So, my questions are:
For an app with a limited amount of concurrent users, is it ok to leave a long-running function in a web process?
If I eventually decide to send this work to a background job it doesn't seem like it would be that hard to change my after save trigger. Am I missing something?
Is there a way to do this that is easier than implementing a message queue?
For an app with a limited amount of concurrent users, is it ok to leave a long-running function in a web process?
this is more a question of preference, than anything.
in general i say no - it's not ok... but that's based on experience in building rabbitmq services that run in heroku workers, and not seeing this as a difficult thing to do.
with a little practice, you may find that this is the simpler solution, as I have (it allows simpler code, and more robust code, as it splits the web away from the background processor - allowing each to run without knowing about each other directly)
If I eventually decide to send this work to a background job it doesn't seem like it would be that hard to change my after save trigger. Am I missing something?
are you missing something? not really
as long as you write your current in-the-web-process code in a well structured and modular fashion, moving it to a background process is not usually a big deal
most of the panic that people get from having to move code into the background, comes from having their code tightly coupled to the HTTP request / response process (i know from personal experience how painful it can be)
Is there a way to do this that is easier than implementing a message queue?
there are many options for distributed computing and background processing. i personally like RabbitMQ and the messaging patterns that it uses.
i would suggest giving it a try and seeing if it's something that can work well for you.
other options include redis with pub/sub libraries on top of it, using direct HTTP API calls to another web server, or just using a timer in your background process to check database tables on a given frequency and having the code run based on the data it finds.
p.s. you may find my RabbitMQ For Developers course of interest, if you are wanting to dig deeper into RMQ w/ node: http://rabbitmq4devs.com
I am thinking of creating my own simple load test, where I can hit my website with multiple requests (like 100-1000 concurrent users) to see how it performs. I want to try Node.js out, but I don't know if it is the wrong technology for the job, since Node.js don't use threads?
Can I with the async model that Node.js uses, simulate the many user requests, or would that be more appropiate to do in another language like Ruby/.NET/Python?
Node.js ought to be perfect for the task. I do this at work. The one crucial piece that you will have to change is the http socket pool. The following code snipped will disable pooling entirely, letting you starve your Node.js process if you want to.
var http = require('http');
var req = http.request(..., agent: false)
You can read about this more at the http.Agent documentation.
Your concern about threads is astute, but even if you hit that limit (Node is very good at keeping your resources efficient) the solution is simple: start multiple instances (processes) of your load test. As it is, you may have to use multiple machines entirely to correctly simulate load.
In any case, you will not win automatically by using Ruby or Python for this. Asynchronous programming is ideal for I/O and network-bound tasks, and Node excels at this. Similarly, while Ruby and Python have third-party asynchronous frameworks, they're by definition more obscure than the standard asynchronous framework given in Node.
Node can fire off pretty much as many requests as you want it to (though you may have to change the defaults for http:Agent). You're more likely to be limited by what your OS can do than by anything inherent in node (and of course such limitations will apply in any other language you use).
It's simple to create load tests with nodeload.
I'm writing a piece to a project that's responsible for processing tasks outside of the main application facing data server, which is written in javascript using Node.js. It needs to handle tasks which are scheduled in the future and potentially handle tasks that are "right now". The "right now" just means the next time a worker becomes available it will operate on that task, so that bit might not matter. The workers are going to all talk to external resources, an example job would be to send an email. We are a small shop and we don't have a ton of resources so one thing I don't want to do is start mixing languages at this point in the process, and I already see that Node can do this for us pretty easily, so that's what we're going to go with unless I see a compelling reason not to before I start coding, which is soon.
All that said, I can't tell if there is a compelling reason to use an AMQP based server, like OpenAMQ or RabbitMQ over something like Kue or Beanstalkd with a node client. So, here we go:
Is there a compelling reason to use an AMQP based server over something like beanstalkd or redis with Kue? If yes, which AMPQ based server would fit best with the architecture that I laid out? If no, which nosql solution (beanstalkd, redis/Kue) would be easiest to set up and fastest to deploy?
FWIW, I'm not accepting my answer yet, I'm going to explain what I've decided and why. If I don't get any answers that appear to be better than what I've decided, I'll accept my own later.
I decided on Kue. It supports multiple workers running asynchronously, and with cluster it can take advantage of multicore systems. It is easily extended to provide security. It's backed with Redis, which is used all over for this exact thing, so I know I'm not backing my job process server with unproven software (that's not to say that any of the others are unproven.)
The most compelling reasons that I picked Kue is that it provides a JSON api so that the client applications (The first client is going to be a web based application, but we're planning on making smartphone apps also) can add jobs easily without going through the main application facing node instance, so I can be totally out of the way of the rest of my team as I write this. I don't need a route, I don't need anything, and it's all provided for me so I don't need to write anything to support this. This has another advantage, with an extention to provide l/p security only authorized clients can add jobs, so I don;t have to expose my redis server to client applications directly. It also has a built in web console and the API allows the client to pull back lists of jobs associated with a given user very easily, so we can show the user all of their scheduled tasks in a nifty calendar view with 0 effort on my part.
The other compelling reason is the lack of steep learning curve associated with getting redis and Kue going for me. I've set up redis before, and Kue is simple and effective.
Yes, I'm a lazy developer, but I'm the good kind of lazy developer.
UPDATE:
I have it working and doing jobs, the throughput is amazing. I split out the task marshaling logic into it's own node instance, basically all I have to do is deploy my repo to a new machine and run node task-server.js to scale out my workers. I may need to add in some more job searching calls to Kue, because of how I implimented a few things, but that will be easy.
We are planning to start a fairly complex web-portal which is expected to attract good local traffic and I've been told by my boss to consider/analyse node.js for the serve side.
I think scalability and multi-core support can be handled with an Nginx or Cherokee in front.
1) Is this node.js ready for some serious/big business?
2) Does this 'event/asynchronous' paradigm on server side has the potential to support the heavy traffic and data operation ? considering the fact that 'everything' is being processed in a single thread and all the live connections would be lost if it got crashed (though its easy to restart).
3) What are the advantages of event based programming compared to thread based style ? or vice-versa.
(I know of higher cost associated with thread switching but hardware can be squeezed with event model.)
Following are interesting but contradicting (to some extent) papers:-
1) http://www.usenix.org/events/hotos03/tech/full_papers/vonbehren/vonbehren_html
2) http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~rtm/papers/dabek:event.pdf
Node.js is developing extremely rapidly, and most of its functionality is sturdy and ready for business. However, there are a lot of places where its lacking, like database drivers, jquery and DOM, multiple http headers, etc. There are plenty of modules coming up tackling every aspect, but for a production environment you'll have to be careful to pick ones that are stable.
Its actually much MUCH more efficient using a single thread than a thousand (or even fifty) from an operating system perspective, and benchmarks I've read (sorry, don't have them on hand -- will try to find them and link them later) show that it's able to support heavy traffic -- not sure about file-system access though.
Event based programming is:
Cleaner-looking code than threaded code (in JavaScript, that is)
The JavaScript engine is extremely efficient with processing events and handling callbacks, and its easily one of the languages seeing the most runtime optimization right now.
Harder to fit when you are thinking in terms of control flow. With events, you can never be sure of the flow. However, you can also come to think of it as more dynamic programming. You can treat each event being fired as independent.
It forces you to be more security-conscious when programming, for the above reason. In that sense, its better than linear systems, where sometimes you take sanitized input for granted.
As for the two papers, both are relatively old. The first benchmarks against this, which as you can see, has a more recent note about these studies:
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/proj/seda/
It also cites the second paper you linked about what they have done, but refuses to comment on its relevance to the comparison between event-based systems and thread-based ones :)
Try yourself to discover the truth
See What is Node.js? where we cover exactly that:
Node in production is definitely possible, but far from the "turn-key" deployment seemingly promised by the docs. With Node v0.6.x, "cluster" has been integrated into the platform, providing one of the essential building blocks, but my "production.js" script is still ~150 lines of logic to handle stuff like creating the log directory, recycling dead workers, etc. For a "serious" production service, you also need to be prepared to throttle incoming connections and do all the stuff that Apache does for PHP. To be fair, Rails has this exact problem. It is solved via two complementary mechanisms: 1) Putting Rails/Node behind a dedicated webserver (written in C and tested to hell and back) like Nginx (or Apache / Lighttd). The webserver can efficiently serve static content, access logging, rewrite URLs, terminate SSL, enforce access rules, and manage multiple sub-services. For requests that hit the actual node service, the webserver proxies the request through. 2) Using a framework like "Unicorn" that will manage the worker processes, recycle them periodically, etc. I've yet to find a Node serving framework that seems fully baked; it may exist, but I haven't found it yet and still use ~150 lines in my hand-rolled "production.js".