Increasing the Throughput of a Node.js Application : Running on the Heroku Cloud App Platform

Abstract: The purpose of this thesis was to investigate whether utilization of the Node.js Cluster module within a web application in an environment with limited resources (the Heroku Cloud App Platform) could lead to an increase in throughput of the application and, in the case of an increase, how substantial it was. This has been done by load testing an example application when utilizing the module and without utilizing it. In both scenarios, the traffic sent in to the application varied from 10 requests/second to 100 requests/second. For the tests conducted on the application utilizing the module the number of worker process used within the application varied between 1 and 16. Furthermore, the tests were first conducted in a local environment in order to establish any increases in throughput in a stable environment, and, in case there were notable differences in throughput of the application, the same tests were conducted on the Heroku Cloud App Platform. Each test was also aimed towards testing one of two different types of tasks performed by the application: I/O or CPU bound. From the test results, it could be derived that utilization of the Cluster module did not lead to any increases in throughput when the application was doing I/O bound tasks in neither of the environments. However, when doing CPU bound tasks, it led to a ≥20% increase when the traffic sent to the application in the local environment was 10 requests/second or higher. The same increase could be seen when the traffic sent to the application was 50 requests/second or higher in the Heroku environment. The conclusion was, thus, that utilization of the module would be useful for the company (that this thesis took place at) in case an application installed on Heroku was exposed to higher traffic.