New Relic now supports Node.js

I must admit I have been annoyed by it in the past but it seems to have dropped off a little recently, I wonder if things are changing.

Don't blame me. The official policy is that titles on HN must be the title as given on the referenced page. I would have made it something more descriptive, but that's a waste of time.

PG's comprehensive explanation is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572466

Added in edit: Hah! I see now that the title has been changed so that it isn't the title on the page, even though it wasn't "egregious linkbait, or false." Color me confused. I'm not complaining, the new title is probably better, but changing it seems completely at odds with PG's statement.

Yeah! Normally this title format means "X acquired Y", so made me do a double take.

I was fortunate enough to attend a talk given by the person primarily responsible for writing it and he (as well as some people already using it) said they see no discernable performance difference.

We're working on a somehow similar product that works by understanding the network traffic received and sent by your application. This means it can be language independent. http://packetbeat.com/

(Product Manager @ New Relic here)

We launched a bunch of stuff today, including a new Agent SDK that is designed for exactly this purpose. It's beta today and has limited functionality, but give it a shot and let us know how it goes for you.

https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/features/agent-sdk

With the New Relic Platform, you can write a Plugin to report data about anything you want. There are Java and Ruby SDKs, and if you prefer, there is an HTTP API.

https://newrelic.com/platform https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/plugin-dev/

Hope that helps you. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

https://addons.heroku.com/librato provides insight into your Heroku dynos.

https://addons.heroku.com/adept-scale does too to some extent.

Some advantages:

- Yes, built-in async support is very important

- Everyone has to write JS at some point anyways -- it helps to take advantage of what everyone already knows

- You can easily share code between the client and the server

- There are tons of modules available on NPM already

- The compile-to-JS languages are getting more practical every day, and you can integrate them with existing JS code

If you consider time spent learning a platform compared to what you get out of it, Node.js is probably the best bang for your buck today.

Node came at a time when client side JS was really starting to take off. I can't speak much about Go or Erlang, but I suspect a lot of it has to do with marketing and some lucky momentum.

It also helps that tools like Grunt are Node based, causing frontend devs to look to Node when they need to stand up a back end. At least, Grunt was a pathway into Node for me anyway.

Node allows you to write JavaScript on the server, which is pretty awesome if you're interested in sharing code (validation, etc) on a client-heavy web app.

I don't have any experience with Go or Erlang, but Node's particular brand of asynchrony is all about non-blocking IO. There are no threads -- all instructions happen in one thread.

The way I see it, go & erlang is rather about concurrency (and parallelism). async the node way is single threaded.

Anyway, the reason probably has rather to do with JavaScript (V8's speed) and node's eco-system (tools, libraries).