Performance comparison and evaluation of Node.js and traditional web server (IIS)

Abstract

As the technological needs increase there is an increase in the necessity for information of users using the internet that has lead to the development of real-time web services. This paper analyses the differences of Node.js compared to traditional web server-IIS. Node provides a high performance, asynchronous event-based server. Node.js is event-based and uses single thread for its event loop, which allows developers to use asynchronous interfaces to do I/O operations. Traditional Web servers (IIS) follow the multiple thread request model. This paper shows how the architectural choices of Node.js and traditional web server brings an affect in the way applications perform that run on them. Web services operate over network throughput which is considered as a metric parameter for evaluation. They are developed both in node.js as well as in .NET which are hosted in Internet Information Services (IIS Server). Systematic tests are performed presenting different scenarios to make a comparison of the performance of Node and IIS. The performance evaluation results show some valuable performance data of Node and IIS Server in a certain time. The results show that lightweight and efficient nature of Node.js. A web server environment which can perform in heavily can be built with node. Hence it is good for developing web-service APIs.