I do know that node is being used by companies like Walmart, LinkedIn,
PayPal, NetFlix, Dow Jones, and more. Walmart released node on Black Friday
of 2013 to handle their mobile traffic (about half of all www.walmart.com
traffic). LinkedIn is using node for all of their mobile. Are the companies
just listed using node for "simple applets," as you are conceiving simple
applets?
Kelly,
My view of Node.js has been shaped mostly by discussions on this list. I'm
not very aware of how it might be used at the high-profile organizations
that you've listed.
Personally, I'm interested in using Node.js as a broadcast service for
Websocket listeners as part of an online meeting application. I could
imagine similar uses at NetFlix and Dow Jones.
But this discussion is about hosting large numbers of apps; Say ERP-class
systems. And we're still perplexed by concerns such as "request routing"
within Node.js, having to restart the service every time a new "route" is
added, and the probability of developers doing something that will cause
the entire environment (HTTP, request routing, and all applications) to
fail.
Nobody has been able to address those concerns, and I don't have the
answers either.
The link you posted in the other thread about Node.js "going up in flames"
at NetFlix concluded with:
"We made incorrect assumptions about the Express.js API without digging
further into its code base. As a result, our misuse of the Express.js API
was the ultimate root cause of our performance issue."
A Google search on "Walmart Node.js" returns a lot of references about a
major "memory leak" problem. Walmart spent $2 million between 2013-2014 on
a framework to replace Express.js. By now the cost could b up to $5 million.
One of the key Node.js developers at Walmart described their Node.js setup
as a "proxy" routing requests to their Java back-end business-rules server.
Walmart has a server farm where they deploy a single Node.js process per VM
which hosts an OS. That makes me shake my head. Possibly hundreds of VM /
OS instances running One Node.js process each?
PHP developers once boasted about Facebook as a reference site. Facebook
later revealed that their infrastructure costs were too high with PHP, so
they came up with a solution which "transformed" PHP to C, to address
performance concerns.
Please don't interpret my remarks as being anti-Node, PHP, or whatever. I
just have concerns in regards to "large numbers of apps".
midrange.com
