What are the advantages/disadvantages of using node.js with a connect.vhost directive as a router rather than NGINX using proxy_pass?
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2 Answers
Connect.vhost
pros
- fairly simple
- only one server to worry about
- you won't have multiple processes on the same host fighting for the same memory
cons
- does not scale beyond 1 core, if you need to cluster beyond one machine, you are back with nginx or similar anyway.
- you still need a solution to redirect port 80 to node.js (unless you are fine running node as root), such as iptables, or nginx.
nginx
pros
- this is used by thousands (millions?) of websites as their front-end or only server
- won't add much overhead
- you could serve static files directly without having node.js do it
I'd pick nginx pretty much by default, but I could see using Connect.vhost for something I need quick and won't need to scale on.
6 Comments
Dan Kanze
Does NGINX balance X Node.js server(s) requests evenly over Y cores? Or does Node.js - no matter what - use a single core.
Pascal Belloncle
typically, on a 16 core server, you could run 16 node.js processes, unless you need to run databases or other services. A node.js is pretty much single threaded (although node itself uses a few other threads for house keeping), and you may get to use a bit more than one core during i/o. As a rule of thumb, I use one node.js process === 1 core.
Pascal Belloncle
this doesn't mean a single node.js process can't handle 1000s of requests simultaneously. It can. But once you've maxxed out on that process, having more cores is not going to help unless you start more than one process.
Trevor Dixon
Use the cluster module and you can take advantage of all cores with either solution.
Dan Kanze
So is Node.js server when managed by NGINX interpreted as a process where each process request is paired with the next most available core is are they always utilizing the same core no matter what?
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Connect vhost Advantage: WebSockets just work. You don't have to install and configure nginx. The whole stack is node.js. Behavior may be more customizable to your liking.
Nginx Advantage: Nginx is a mature and stable web server. It's very unlikely to crash or exhibit strange behavior. It can also host your static resources, PHP site, etc.
If it were me, unless I needed some particular feature of Nginx, I'd pick Connect vhost or node-http-proxy for the sake of having an all-node.js stack.
