ASP.NET Web Api vs Node.js Benchmark, Take 2

Here’s a new run of the ASP.NET Web Api vs Node.js benchmark but this time with few changes:

• ASP.NET Web Api: The release candidate is used instead of beta.
• ASP.NET Web Api: Self-Host is used instead of IIS.
• ASP.NET Web Api: Use of async / await
• Node.js: Version 0.6.19 is used instead of 0.6.17.

Also the test environment was tweaked a little and this time there was a dedicated c1.medium server for the ab.

The test

A simple server which accepts a POST-request and then responds back with the request’s body.

Node.js Implementation

var express = require('express') 
    , app = express.createServer(); 

app.use(express.bodyParser()); 

app.post('/', function(req, res){ 
    res.send(req.body); 
}); 

app.listen(8080);

ASP.NET Web Api implementation

public class ValuesAsyncController : ApiController 
{ 
    public async Task<string> Post() 
    { 
        return await this.ControllerContext.Request.Content.ReadAsStringAsync(); 
    } 
}

The benchmark

I used Apache’s ab tool to test the performance of the platforms. The benchmark was run with the following settings:

• Total number of requests: 100 000
• Concurrency: 80

The benchmark (test.dat) contained a simple JSON, taken from Wikipedia.

{
     "firstName": "John",
     "lastName" : "Smith",
     "age"      : 25,
     "address"  :
     {
         "streetAddress": "21 2nd Street",
         "city"         : "New York",
         "state"        : "NY",
         "postalCode"   : "10021"
     },
     "phoneNumber":
     [
         {
           "type"  : "home",
           "number": "212 555-1234"
         },
         {
           "type"  : "fax",
           "number": "646 555-4567"
         }
     ]
 }

Here’s the whole command which was used to run the performance test:

ab -n 100000 -c 80 -p .test.dat -T 'application/json; charset=utf-8' http://localhost/

The performance test was run 3 times and the best result for each platform was selected. The performance difference between the test runs was minimal.

The Test Environment

The benchmark was run on a Windows Server 2008 R2, hosted on an c1.medium Amazon EC2 –instance:

Specs of the instance

• 1.7GB memory
• 5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores)

Versions

• Node.js: 0.6.19
• ASP.NET Web Api: The release candidate.

The ab has its own dedicated c1.medium –instance. All the instances were on the eu-west-1a zone and the private IP was used to connect the ab and test servers.

The Benchmark Results

Few words about the multi-core systems

Where Node.js is limited to a single thread and as such only uses one processor core, self-hosted Web Api can automatically take advantage of multi-core systems. With Node.js you have to use for example cluster in order to split the workload between the cores.

Here’s a graph from ASP.NET Web Api-server which shows the CPU usage of each logical processor (from my local machine):

Here’s an overall CPU usage when running the Node-server:

And here’s the same graph but this time with the ASP.NET Web Api-server:

The Code

The source code for the implementations and also the test tools (ab.exe, test.dat) are available from GitHub.