Benchmark Node.js performance with Autocannon

Benchmark Node.js with Autocannon

After validating that Node.js is installed and your HTTP server is running, you can benchmark it using Autocannon. You’ll use Autocannon to run a series of tests, analyze the results, and identify areas for optimization. Benchmarking on Arm64 provides valuable insights into how Node.js applications scale and perform in cloud environments, helping you make informed decisions about deployment and resource allocation.

Install Autocannon

Autocannon is a fast HTTP/1.1 benchmarking tool for Node.js, used to measure server throughput, latency, and request handling under concurrent load. To install Autocannon, run this command:

    

        
        
npm install -g autocannon

    

Start the Node.js HTTP server

If your sample HTTP server isn’t running from the last section, start it by using this command:

    

        
        
export MY_NODE=`which node`
sudo ${MY_NODE} app.js &

    

The server should be listening on port 80 in the background:

    

        
        Server running at http://0.0.0.0:80/

        
    

Run a local Node.js benchmark with Autocannon

Now run a local Node.js benchmark with Autocannon:

    

        
        
autocannon -c 100 -d 10 http://localhost:80

    

You should see an output similar to:

    

        
        Running 10s test @ http://localhost:80
100 connections


┌─────────┬──────┬──────┬───────┬──────┬─────────┬─────────┬───────┐
│ Stat    │ 2.5% │ 50%  │ 97.5% │ 99%  │ Avg     │ Stdev   │ Max   │
├─────────┼──────┼──────┼───────┼──────┼─────────┼─────────┼───────┤
│ Latency │ 1 ms │ 1 ms │ 2 ms  │ 2 ms │ 1.06 ms │ 0.41 ms │ 28 ms │
└─────────┴──────┴──────┴───────┴──────┴─────────┴─────────┴───────┘
┌───────────┬─────────┬─────────┬─────────┬────────┬───────────┬──────────┬─────────┐
│ Stat      │ 1%      │ 2.5%    │ 50%     │ 97.5%  │ Avg       │ Stdev    │ Min     │
├───────────┼─────────┼─────────┼─────────┼────────┼───────────┼──────────┼─────────┤
│ Req/Sec   │ 66,175  │ 66,175  │ 70,847  │ 72,191 │ 70,713.61 │ 1,616.86 │ 66,134  │
├───────────┼─────────┼─────────┼─────────┼────────┼───────────┼──────────┼─────────┤
│ Bytes/Sec │ 12.8 MB │ 12.8 MB │ 13.7 MB │ 14 MB  │ 13.7 MB   │ 313 kB   │ 12.8 MB │
└───────────┴─────────┴─────────┴─────────┴────────┴───────────┴──────────┴─────────┘

Req/Bytes counts sampled once per second.
# of samples: 10

707k requests in 10.02s, 137 MB read

        
    

Interpret the Autocannon benchmark metrics

Now have a look at the Autocannon benchmark metrics to get a sense of how Node.js performed. Here is an explanation of the metrics and what they mean:

• The average latency (Avg) shows the mean time it takes for each request to receive a response from the server.
• Standard deviation (Stdev) indicates how much the response times vary around the average; lower values mean the server responds more consistently.
• The minimum latency (Min) represents the fastest response recorded during the benchmark, highlighting the best-case performance for individual requests.

Review Node.js benchmark results on Arm64

Here are the results from the earlier run on the c4a-standard-4 (4 vCPU, 16 GB memory) Arm64 VM in GCP (SUSE):

Latency results (ms):

Throughput results:

Evaluate Node.js performance on Arm64

Now that you have the benchmarking results, you can see how Node.js performs on Arm64:

• The average latency is low, around 1.2 ms, which means your server responds quickly to requests.
• Response times are consistent, with only occasional spikes up to 24 ms.
• The server processes a high volume of traffic, averaging about 53,800 requests per second.
• Data transfer rates are efficient, averaging 10.4 MB per second during the benchmark.