Node.JS Socket server and connection on same server slow down

Question

I may be doing something wrong here, but essentially I have a service layer that intercepts post requests to a certain url. It's important this is never down so I isolated it from the main server. I figured it'd be easiest to have the service layer take the http requests and send the resulting XML packet over any streams connected. Well, it's technically working, but the problem I'm having is that the server and client are both on the same machine and it seems as if stream.write is filling up the kernel buffer and slowing down the amount of time between when it hits the service layer to when it actually gets to the client.

On the Server Side

• On connect I push the stream into an array of connections, I also set an interval to make sure that I have received a message within the past 12 seconds (heartbeat).

• On receive I iterate over the stream array, make sure it's writable and write the xml packet to it.

On the Client Side

• Write "Heartbeat" every 8 seconds to ensure I don't get disconnected

• On incoming message I parse the XML into a JSON object and deal w/ it within the server.

Nothing about this seems outrageous, but I may be missing something.

Answer 1

I figured it'd be easiest to have the service layer take the http requests and send the resulting XML packet over any streams connected.

One thing to remember is that node buffers things sent over streams. Like you noted, "stream.write is filling up the kernel buffer", this is intended behavior, as usually one does not use streams to communicate in this way. You might try something different like sending requests over sockets to your other process?

Hopefully this helps a bit?

Stop into #node.js and ask us questions anytime!

Edit: on second thought, are you already using sockets? If so, my answer is really unhelpful, apologies.