String concatenation in NodeJS

This repo contains the full code of my blog entry.

Install instructions:

1. Run npm install. (This is a NodeJS app).
2. Create a file named .env in the root folder.

The .env file content:

STARTING_LENGTH=10            # Starting number of concatenations.
MULTIPLIER=10                 # Multiply <STARTING_LENGTH> by this number in every iteration. 
ITERATIONS=5                  # Number of iterations to be tested with.
#DISABLE_BUFF_TO_STRING=true  # Disable converting `Buffer` to `String` in `service_v3.js`.

Running instructions:

To be fair, the app node <file.js> must be ran using the flag --expose-gc, so we can use global.gc() to do a full garbage collector run before test, so the garbage collector does not run in the middle of the tests.

There are two 'different' ways of running it:

1. node --expose-gc index.js
2. node --jitless --expose-gc index.js

The way #2 actually disable the jit compiler with the flag --jitless.

Notes:

Environment: DISABLE_BUFF_TO_STRING --> If you set it to true (you can just uncomment the line by removing the leading #) you can see that the services actually runs faster, but the result is not the same, but can be useful depending on your scenario.

Setup info:

• CPU: I7-9700K
• RAM: 32GB - 3200MHz
• Windows 10 (20H2)
• Node version: v16.5.0

Running samples:

STARTING_LENGTH: 10 | MULTIPLIER: 10 | ITERATIONS: 5 | DISABLE_BUFF_TO_STRING: true

service version	iteration #1	iteration #2	iteration #3	iteration #4	iteration #5
V1 - Concatenation	0ms (27.14 MB)	0ms (27.73 MB)	0ms (27.64 MB)	0ms (29.57 MB)	20ms (40.26 MB)
V2 - File system as buffer	26ms (27.44 MB)	10ms (28.41 MB)	80ms (36.20 MB)	735ms (97.33 MB)	6745ms (708.92 MB)
V3 - Direct Buffers	0ms (27.45)	0ms (27.92 MB)	1ms (32.91 MB)	7ms (63.60 MB)	74ms (374.65 MB)
V4 - Using Arrays	0ms (27.72 MB)	0ms (27.91 MB)	2ms (32.91 MB)	12ms (63.67 MB)	127ms (376.08 MB)

Those results are extracted from logs/standard_run.txt. Memory were measured with process.memoryUsage.rss() / 1024 / 1024. If you need more test results, please, test it by yourself 😊.

Author:

Enmanuel Reynoso | DarkRoku12 | enmarey2012@hotmail.com