Do's and Don'ts for Making Your NodeJS Application Faster

In this fiercely competitive app development market, everyone is aggressively looking for tools and technologies that give them the power to rule every operating system but with a single solution. Additionally, robust technology is also required to meet the constantly growing need for interactive and engaging applications. 

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Analyzing the trend, it has been figured out that Node.js (as a framework) is highly relied upon for creating awesome apps that matters. It, indeed, is seen as a perfect solution for server-side development.  

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Node.js is becoming more popular since market dominants have started to rely on it too. Some, of which are:

• LinkedIn
• Netflix
• PayPal
• eBay
• Uber
• Trello 
• Medium 
• Groupon 

But, hey, we can’t ignore the reality that working with Node.js is not that easy. It has its pros and cons, right! We are not saying the technology is unreliable, but we can’t just completely ignore the challenges that come along. 

(If you are a manager who wants to hire a node.js developer, this post will help you get the proper knowledge to hire people with better app development understanding. And, if you are a newbie developer or even a seasoned one, you can learn to achieve better results by integrating a few resources). 

Node.js - Let’s Talk About the Solutions 

If you are a Node.js developer reading this, you would know what goes into making a high-end node.js app. So, naturally, the most prominent issue is related to speed. So, we will mention some amazing solutions that can help all such speed-related problems at bay (when developing a node.js app). 

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Proven Strategies to Optimize the Speed/Performance of Node.js Apps

A successful Node.js app must bring value to the user within 10 seconds and engage them for longer. Node.js is famous for developing intelligent, quick, and scalable apps. The reason is that this framework used event-driven architecture and non-blocking tasks, running on a single thread. 

Here are the techniques that actually speed up Node.js applications’ speed:

1. Cache to Keep Up the Load Balance 

Caching is a technique to store data where it can be retrieved without accessing the origin. Thus, it enhances response time while minimizing bandwidth costs and data volumes. But, just remember that the performance/speed of the app will be affected once it starts receiving high traffic. That’s when it gets harder to maintain the load balance and manage the traffic. And, when it happens, regular caching can undoubtedly help in Node.js performance optimization ultimately. 

Reliable tools to cache Node.js apps:

1. Node-Cache which has a timeout to delete data from the cache when timeout expires. 
2. Memcached Stores data across different nodes using hashing schema to offer hash table functionality. It ensures that adding/removing server nodes doesn’t impact the mapping of keys to server nodes. 
3. Redis Cache which modifies data in the server’s main memory, lets the system retrieve data needed in the least time possible. But, as a result, it reduces the overall speed of the app. 
4. Nginx helps maintain load balancing by caching static files, which offloads the work of the app server. 

2. Using Synchronous Functions in a Limit 

We know that Node.js is designed using single-thread architecture and asynchronous coding to ensure non-blocking operational flow. However, when the synchronous components are available, it will certainly block the apps and slow down the app’s speed and even diminish its performance, for that matter. 

With asynchronous coding, you will use queues to keep track of the workflow, letting you append additional tasks and callbacks without really blocking the main thread. However, your web page may make some blocking calls when using Asynchronous methods, which is why hiring a Node.js expert is essential to take care of such concerns and tasks. 

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3. Run in Parallel 

Node.js app development process needs to retrieve multiple data from different sources to render the HTML page for any dashboard. For that, a developer needs to make multiple internal API calls. However, all these multiples processes and functions are absolutely time-consuming, highly affecting the speed and performance of the application. 

Hence, to retrieve all these details, most Node.js developers create a separate middleware for every function. Once that is done, it is attached to the dashboard route. Simply put, the simple way to speed up the Node.js processes is to make things run parallelly. Also, Node.js is aptly designed to run multiple asynchronous functions in parallel, so doing that completely makes sense. 

4. Optimizing Queries

That is another way to maximize the speed and performance of your Node.js app - optimize the queries. Let’s suppose you are running a blog app with the most recent or latest posts on the home page. In this case, developers will have to use a specific command to fetch the data using Mongoose. 

Post.find().limit(10).exec(function(err, posts) {

//send posts to client 

}};

However, the significant challenge here would be to use the find() function in Mongoose fetches all the fields of an object, and there may appear certain fields in the ‘Post’ object, which are not needed on the homepage. So, if we are excluding certain elements (like comments) while fetching the posts on the homepage, it is likely to increase the speed and performance of the application. 

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5. Tracking Activity with Logging 

Logging is an essential part of the entire app development process. But why is it critical? In cases where your Node.js app starts to misbehave, and you want to identify the real error, you can easily do that with Logging. It can help you track the activity quickly and API process traffic. 

Generally, developers use console.log as default to insert logs on the output standard. Also, Log Error goes in error standard. However, if you ask senior Node.js developers or experts in the field, they will suggest using a more prominent logging module like Buyan or Morgan. Tracking activity with logging will certainly help you speed up the app and its performance as well. 

Node.js - Why Should You Use It? 

There are different reasons why you should choose Node.js for your next app development project. Here are a few of them:

1. Node.js is a lightweight framework and an apt solution for asynchronous programming. 
2. This framework allows you to do coding for both the server-side and client-side. 
3. With Node.js, you can develop some real-time and highly engaging apps in a short span. 
4. The execution of this framework is done at lightning-fast speed.
5. NPM helps in speeding up the productivity of the Node.js developers, allowing them to build highly interactive apps quickly. 
6. Developers get access to a vast number of free tools to try their hands on. 
7. Node.js developers enjoy robust corporate support. 
8. Developers get seamless JSON support for communication without converting between binary models and used JS. 

Thumbs Up for Node.js and the Techniques to Speed Up App

Node.js app development is highly relied upon by most Node.js developers nowadays. The secret is behind its lightning-fast speed to build apps and make them more innovative and engaging enough to hook the users. Talking about the speed challenges, there are enough strategies and tricks to get rid of slow apps. You can always hire Node.js app developers to take care of all such development concerns.