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Comment by rauchp | Hacker News Reader

That was an interesting read, thanks for linking to it. It's hard finding articles online discussing Node and performance, most people just dismiss it as an unviable option due to scale and speed concerns. 30x really is quite the jump though.

> Each Node worker runs a gRPC server

Not going to lie, this kind of surprised me. When I think of a Node backend I think of ExpressJS. Not because I think Express is better, but because it's been pushed around in the past few years as the fastest, simplest way of running a backend.

Yet, if you're going to be running a gRPC server, why not use a more performant language with better multithreading support? I thought this article was about them optimizing a grandfathered-in solution (such as Express), but I can't tell why they built out a gRPC server in Node in the first place.

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Our integrations are primarily written in Node, which was the original language used for everything at Plaid. Almost all of those original services (except for integrations) have been migrated to Go or Python at this point. We've standardized on gRPC as our wire format, so we stayed consistent and used gRPC in Node.

With perfect hindsight, it's a fair point that all the pros and cons could net out to another language being best for our integrations. Integrations are the largest and most quickly-changing codebase at Plaid, so such a migration would be a massive undertaking. We definitely didn't want to block scalability improvements on doing a language migration.

I've been hoping that the Cloudflare folks will open source parts of their Workers; they seem to have figured out a secure, performant way to run untrusted javascript at scale.

The Node gRPC implementation is fine. It uses the C++ implementation which is the gold standard. It has Prometheus and OpenTracing interceptors. You basically give nothing up by using it, if your team wants to write a language that runs on node.

The bigger issue to me, is (at least the last time I looked) you can't use the cluster module with node combined with gRPC, so the only real way to take advantage of extra CPU capacity, if available is workers or external processes that are self-managed vs. cluster integration.

I think you can just run one node.js per core (or whatever the optimal balance is) and tell your load balancer that there are instances of your service available at hostname:8080, hostname:8081, etc. A lot of people are going to get this "for free" when they tell their container orchestrator that they want 8 replicas that each request 1 cpu, and the scheduler finds a node with 8 free cpus.

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