Node.js Scaling Application

Why do we Scale Application ?

The workload is the most popular reason we scale our applications, but it’s not the only reason. We also scale our applications to increase their availability and tolerance to failure.

There are mainly three different things we can do to scale an application:

1) Cloning: The easiest thing to do to scale a big application is to clone it multiple times and have each cloned instance handle part of the workload. This does not cost a lot in term of development time and it’s highly effective.

2) Decomposing: We can also scale an application by decomposing it based on functionalities and services. This means having multiple, different applications with different code bases and sometimes with their own dedicated databases and User Interfaces.

3) Splitting: We can also split the application into multiple instances where each instance is responsible for only a part of the application’s data. This strategy is often named horizontal partitioning, or shading, in databases.

Successfully scaling a big application should eventually implement all three strategies. Node.js makes it easy to do so. We are also going to explore the built-in tools available in Node.js to implement it.

What is Node.js Scaling Application ?

Node.js runs in a single-thread mode, but it uses an event-driven paradigm to handle concurrency. It also facilitates creation of child processes to leverage parallel processing on multi-core CPU based systems.

Child processes always have three streams child.stdin, child.stdout, and child.stderr which may be shared with the stdio streams of the parent process.

Node provides child_process module which has the following three major ways to create a child process.

• exec: child_process.exec method runs a command in a shell/console and buffers the output.

• spawn: child_process.spawn launches a new process with a given command.

• fork: The child_process.fork method is a special case of the spawn() to create child processes.

The exec() method

child_process.exec method runs a command in a shell and buffers the output. It has the following signature:

child_process.exec(command[, options], callback)

Parameters

Here is the description of the parameters used:

1. command (String) The command to run, with space-separated arguments

2. options (Object) may comprise one or more of the following options:

• cwd (String) Current working directory of the child process

• env (Object) Environment key-value pairs

• encoding (String) (Default: 'utf8')

• shell (String) Shell to execute the command with (Default: '/bin/sh' on UNIX, 'cmd.exe' on Windows, The shell should understand the -c switch on UNIX or /s /c on Windows. On Windows, command line parsing should be compatible with cmd.exe.)

• timeout (Number) (Default: 0)

• maxBuffer (Number) (Default: 200*1024)

3. callback The function gets three arguments error, stdout, and stderr which are called with the output when the process terminates.

The exec() method returns a buffer with a max size and waits for the process to end and tries to return all the buffered data at once.

Example:

Let us create two js files named sub.js and main.js:

File: sub.js

console.log("Child Process " + process.argv[2] + " executed." );

File: main.js

const fs = require('fs');
const child_process = require('child_process');

for(var i=0; i<3; i++) {
   var workerProcess = child_process.exec('node sub.js '+i,function 
      (error, stdout, stderr) {
 
      if (error) {
 console.log(error.stack);
 console.log('Error code: '+error.code);
 console.log('Signal received: '+error.signal);
      }
 console.log('stdout: ' + stdout);
 console.log('stderr: ' + stderr);
   });

   workerProcess.on('exit', function (code) {
 console.log('Child process exited with exit code '+code);
   });
}

Now run the main.js to see the result:

$ node main.js

Output

Child process exited with exit code 0
stdout: Child Process 1 executed.

stderr:
Child process exited with exit code 0
stdout: Child Process 0 executed.

stderr:
Child process exited with exit code 0
stdout: Child Process 2 executed.

The spawn() Method

child_process.spawn method launches a new process with a given command. It has the following signature:

child_process.spawn(command[, args][, options])

Parameters

Here is the description of the parameters used:

1. command (String) The command to run

2. args (Array) List of string arguments

3. options (Object) may comprise one or more of the following options:

• cwd (String) Current working directory of the child process.

• env (Object) Environment key-value pairs.

• stdio (Array) String Child's stdio configuration.

• customFds (Array) Deprecated File descriptors for the child to use for stdio.

• detached (Boolean) The child will be a process group leader.

• uid (Number) Sets the user identity of the process.

• gid (Number) Sets the group identity of the process.

The spawn() method returns streams (stdout &stderr) and it should be used when the process returns a volume amount of data. spawn() starts receiving the response as soon as the process starts executing.

Example

Create two js files named sub.js and main.js:

File: sub.js

console.log("Child Process " + process.argv[2] + " executed." );

File: main.js

const fs = require('fs');
const child_process = require('child_process');
 
for(var i = 0; i<3; i++) {
   var workerProcess = child_process.spawn('node', ['sub.js', i]);

 workerProcess.stdout.on('data', function (data) {
 console.log('stdout: ' + data);
   });

 workerProcess.stderr.on('data', function (data) {
 console.log('stderr: ' + data);
   });

 workerProcess.on('close', function (code) {
 console.log('child process exited with code ' + code);
   });
}

Now run the main.js to see the result:

$ node main.js

Output

stdout: Child Process 0 executed.

child process exited with code 0
stdout: Child Process 1 executed.

stdout: Child Process 2 executed.

child process exited with code 0
child process exited with code 0

The fork() Method

child_process.fork method is a special case of spawn() to create Node processes. It has the following signature:

child_process.fork(modulePath[, args][, options])

Parameters

Here is the description of the parameters used:

1. modulePath (String) The module to run in the child.

2. args (Array) List of string arguments

3. options (Object) may comprise one or more of the following options:

• cwd (String) Current working directory of the child process.

• env (Object) Environment key-value pairs.

• execPath (String) Executable used to create the child process.

• execArgv (Array) List of string arguments passed to the executable (Default: process.execArgv).

• silent (Boolean) If true, stdin, stdout, and stderr of the child will be piped to the parent, otherwise they will be inherited from the parent, see the "pipe" and "inherit" options for spawn()'s stdio for more details (default is false).

The fork method returns an object with a built-in communication channel in addition to having all the methods in a normal ChildProcess instance.

Example:

Create two js files named sub.js and main.js:

File: sub.js

console.log("Child Process " + process.argv[2] + " executed." );

File: main.js

const fs = require('fs');
const child_process = require('child_process');
 
for(var i=0; i<3; i++) {
   var worker_process = child_process.fork("sub.js", [i]);  

 worker_process.on('close', function (code) {
 console.log('child process exited with code ' + code);
   });
}

Now run the main.js to see the result:

$ node main.js

Output

Child Process 0 executed.
Child Process 1 executed.
Child Process 2 executed.
child process exited with code 0
child process exited with code 0
child process exited with code 0

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