Scale your NodeJS Applications for High Traffic and Improving Performance

Growing your business is essential and so is making sure the user’s experience is seamless. When your business starts to grow, it’s obvious that the number of users visiting your website or application will hike. This at times causes network applications to react slowly or go down for a notable duration, ruining the user experience for your potential buyers. 

In such cases, it’s crucial for businesses to opt for applications that are not only fast and reliable but also offer scalability features. And with businesses opting for global outreach, NodeJS is the best choice when it comes to creating efficient network applications that are scalable.  

But is NodeJS really a good choice for beginning my journey in Network Application Development? 

Well, Node JS is the top choice of all developers who are looking for efficiency, performance, and eventually scalability. The versatility and flexibility of NodeJS on the server side ensure you can develop high-performant applications with ease.

The Architecture is backed by Google’s V8 Javascript Engine, is event-driven, and is capable of Asynchronous I/O. Thus using NodeJS server-side is a common phenomenon among almost all businesses.

But are they really scalable as it’s advertised?

Scaling NodeJS Applications

By default, Node.js uses a single thread to handle non-blocking I/O calls. This means NodeJS Applications will use fewer resources to accept concurrent connections compared to traditional approaches. Thus, it would be safe to say that Node’s efficiency and performance can help you achieve your target goals efficiently.

And with the increase in traffic Scaling your NodeJS applications is comparatively easier as the framework offers an extensive list of scaling techniques and resources. Let’s explore various techniques to scale Node.js applications for high traffic while maintaining optimal performance

1. Optimize Code and Database Queries

Before we move on to complex scaling methods, it’s crucial to make sure the code and database queries you’ve written are well-optimized. An optimized code will perform better under bottleneck conditions, allowing your web app to handle more connection requests effectively. You can try these below-mentioned methods to do it

• Use Asynchronous I/O: Node.js is a single-threaded architecture, so leveraging asynchronous I/O operations is essential to prevent blocking the event loop. This includes using callbacks, Promises, or using async/await for handling asynchronous tasks
• Minimize Synchronous Operations: Avoid using synchronous operations that create a lock in the event loop, as they can lead to performance bottlenecks.
• Cache Data: Implement caching mechanisms for frequently accessed data using technologies like Redis or Memcached. Caching can significantly reduce the load on your database and speed up response times.
• Optimize Database Queries: Ensure that database queries are efficient by using proper indexing and avoiding unnecessary data retrievals. Use tools like the Mongoose profiler to identify slow queries and optimize them.
• Compress Responses: Compressing responses before sending them to clients can reduce the amount of data transferred over the network, improving performance.

Once you’re done optimizing your code, you need to start balancing the traffic load across pages in your application. Let’s understand how to do it

2. Load Balancing

Load balancing is the base method of distributing incoming traffic across the pool of resources that supports your network application, making sure each resource receives a manageable share of the load. Load balancers speed up your application and enhance performance by dividing user requests among multiple servers to cut down user wait time resulting in a better user experience. There are several ways to implement it, let’s unravel them one by one

• Reverse Proxy Load Balancer: Use a reverse proxy load balancer like Nginx or HAProxy to distribute incoming requests to multiple Node.js application instances. This allows you to scale horizontally by adding more application servers.
• Container Orchestration: If you are deploying your Node.js application in containers using technologies like Docker, you can use container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes or Docker Swarm to manage the scaling of your containers.
• Cloud Load Balancers: Many cloud providers offer load-balancing services that can automatically distribute traffic across instances of your application running in their network infrastructures.

Using load balancers to distribute network load across the entire application is a great way of reducing load but while scaling for high traffic, this isn’t the end. Let’s move forward to resource scaling

3. Horizontal and Vertical Scaling

Resource scaling is an important part of scaling your applications for higher traffic by adding more servers or enhancing existing servers by adding more resources. Based on the solutions chosen, they can be divided into 2 major categories

1. Horizontal Scaling: Horizontal scaling involves adding more servers or instances to your application to handle increased traffic. It’s essential to design your application such that no session data is stored on the server. This allows you to add or remove instances without impacting the user experience.
2. Vertical Scaling: Vertical scaling involves upgrading the resources (e.g., CPU, RAM) of your existing server to handle more traffic. While not as flexible as horizontal scaling, vertical scaling can be a quicker solution when you have resource bottlenecks on your current server.

Let’s understand how to scale your applications by implementing better servers and resources

• Use Shared Storage: Store user sessions and other shared data in external storage services like Redis or a database that can be accessed by all instances.
• Stateless Authentication: Use stateless authentication mechanisms like JSON Web Tokens (JWT) to authenticate users, so the authentication state is not tied to a specific server instance.
• Distribute Static Assets: Offload static assets (e.g., images, CSS, JS files) to a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to reduce the load on your servers.
• Use a Scalable Hosting Provider: Choose a hosting provider that allows easy vertical scaling by upgrading the server’s resources when needed.
• Monitor Resource Usage: Regularly monitor your server’s resource usage to identify potential bottlenecks and plan for vertical scaling accordingly.

Now that you’re ready to handle a huge number of visitors, you are ready. But in this competitive web scenario, you can’t compromise on speed and performance along with accessibility. Let’s add some add-on features to make sure your network applications stand out from the competition.

4. Enable Caching

Caching is an effective way to reduce the load on your application and database. Storing data for reuse can reduce the load on your applications as the cache will serve the copy of the page the next time a user requests the same page visited earlier. This helps keep the origin server from getting overloaded and reduces the request time making it quicker to load server applications. Consider implementing these caching techniques and fastening up your web apps

• Client-Side Caching: Set proper cache headers in your responses to allow clients to cache static assets.
• Server-Side Caching: Implement server-side caching using technologies like Redis or in-memory caches to store frequently accessed data.
• Content Delivery Network (CDN): Use a CDN to cache and serve static assets closer to the end-users, reducing the load on your servers.

Once you make sure your network applications are fast enough to load, the only bottleneck that might arise due to high traffic is due to Database load. You can reduce it by using Distributed Databases.

5. Distributed Databases

A distributed database is basically a database not limited to a single system, it is spread over multiple sites, i.e., on multiple computers or over a network of computers that don’t share physical components amongst them. This may be required when a particular database needs to be accessed by a large number of users. It needs to be managed such that for the users it looks like one single database and can avoid performance hold-ups. Let’s understand how to do it

• Sharding: Implement sharding, which involves distributing data across multiple database instances based on a specific shard key. This allows you to horizontally scale your database.
• Replication: Use database replication to create multiple copies of your database for read-heavy operations. This improves read performance and provides high availability.
• NoSQL Databases: Consider using NoSQL databases like MongoDB or Cassandra, which are designed to handle large-scale distributed data and offer better scalability.

Now that you’ve made sure that your entire application is free of performance, accessibility, and speed congestion, all you need to do is scale your node applications to handle immense network traffic. The scaling approach may vary depending on your specific use case and requirements.

Make sure to regularly monitor your application’s performance and be ready to adjust your scaling strategy as your traffic and user base grow. By investing in scaling and optimization early on, you can create a robust and high-performing Node.js application that can handle any challenge that comes its way.

Conclusion

Scaling Node.js applications for high traffic and improved performance requires a combination of architectural decisions, code optimization, and the use of appropriate tools and techniques. By implementing load balancing, horizontal and vertical scaling, distributed databases, caching, and optimizing code and network operations, you can ensure your application performs efficiently even under heavy loads.

At Canopus Infosystems, we make sure all our MEAN and MERN stack developers are well aware of your future scaling needs and you get Enterprise Applications that cope with evolving trends and are fast and creative enough to make your end-user journey feel seamless.