Node.js vs python, Java, and PHP: I/O Speed Comparison

The first question that comes to one's mind is: “Is it really possible to compare these...

The first question that comes to one's mind is: “Is it really possible to compare these technologies? When one is a run time environment and other are programming languages”. Although it sounds a bit ridiculous, it is indeed possible. Because ultimately what matters is its application/usefulness in real life.

But again the question arises and that is if all these frameworks have their own strengths then on what grounds are we going to compare them?

The answer is I/O requests. Because no matter what every framework/langauage/runtime environment must handle I/O requests, if that is not possible then there is no point of competition.

That being said, in this article we will find out which framework is the fastest when it comes to handling I/O requests, which other parameters must be included and ultimately which framework performed well.

Note: this article is based on various tests conducted by Hackernoon , Nodexl and stackoverflow under similar circumstances to find out which platform performed better.

Performance of nodejs

Node.js is a very fast platform and it is one of the most preferred platform by thousands of companies in the industries, many businesses hire node.js developers to leverage its performance and create scalable apps. This extraordinary performance of nodejs is due to

Event-driven and non-blocking I/O: In simple words Nodejs does not block when it is waiting for an I/O operation to complete; it simply fires an event and continues processing other requests. Apart from that

V8 JavaScript engine: Node.js uses the V8 JavaScript engine, which is known for its speed and performance. The V8 engine is able to compile JavaScript code into machine code, which makes it very fast.

Stream-based data processing : Node.js provides built-in support for streams, which enable efficient processing of large amounts of data by consuming and producing it incrementally. Stream-based data processing reduces memory consumption and improves overall performance.

Parameters for consideration apart from processing of I/O requests.

Undoubtedly I/O requests are crucial but some other factors which must be taken into consideration while measuring speed are:

• Number of requests: The number of requests that each platform was able to handle per second.
• Response time: The average time it took for each platform to respond to a request.
• Memory usage: The amount of memory each platform used to handle the requests.
• CPU utilization: The percentage of CPU time each platform used to handle the requests.

Actual Nodejs vs Python, Java and PHP

Different companies conducted test of nodejs vs other platforms to find out which performed faster and here are the results:

1) Nodejs vs Python:

System specs: 3.6 GHz Intel Core i7 CPU with 16GB of RAM

Benchmark: file I/O was used to measure the I/O performance of each platform. The test was run using a simple web application that read a file from the disk.

The result: Node.js was able to handle 8,000 I/O requests per second, while Python was only able to handle 6,000 requests per second.

2) Nodejs vs Java:

System specs: 2.6 GHz Intel Core i7 CPU with 16GB of RAM

Benchmark: database queries were used to measure the I/O performance of each platform. The test was run using a simple web application that performed a SELECT query on a database.

The result: Node.js handled- 10,000 requests per second, while Java handled - 8,000 requests per second.

3) Express.js vs PHP: expressjs

System specs: 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5 CPU with 8GB of RAM

Benchmark: HTTP requests were used to measure the I/O performance of each platform. The test was run using a simple web application that sent a GET request to each platform

The result: expressjs - 20,000 req/s . PHP 1000 - req/s

Conclusion:

Nodejs is the ultimate beast of I/O operations and top companies are even willing to hire remote node js developer for their businesses, but lets not forget that each of these platforms mentioned here are beasts on their own and have their own strengths. And one must explore multiple scenarios when it comes to selecting the perfect platforms as each have their own benefits and tradeoffs.