V8 is as fast as it can possibly be at running hot. Which for long-running node servers is great. In fast, in my testing, javascript in node is generally slightly faster than lua in luajit.
V8, however is not optimized for process startup. It uses a lot of ram and does a lot of up-front optimizing to get said runtime speed. All software has to make tradeoffs and my experience with V8 and the V8 team is they will sacrifice startup time of the vm itself and memory usage, if it makes the scripts run significantly faster. Yes there is some blame in node as well. Node is under the assumption that most uses are for servers who startup rarely and run for a long time. So a hundred ms of extra startup time on your server doesn't matter at all. I'm not convinced that combining all your js files into a single file will significantly affect process startup time. I'm happy to be proven wrong, but in my experience this is not the bottleneck. One of my responsibilities when I worked on webOS was to make node startup fast-enough on older smart-phones that we could start node processes on-demand in reaction to user-input. We tried creating a fork-server, using snapshots, composing and minifying js code. But in the end, V8 and node were just too heavy and waiting on an on-demand node process affected user experience and introduced significant lag. We would have just kept the node services running all the time, but then they used too much ram. 10mb each was simply too much for a smart-phone. My solution was to use another Vm and it solved all my problems, but then it wasn't javascript anymore, and not many people were interested. (Also the webOS project was killed by the then CEO) If NPK can somehow remove the need for a JavaScript engine, then it will be fast, but if you end up needing all of V8 and js code to run, it will never help memory-usage or startup time, no matter how much you combine everything into a single file. Just starting a node repl on these devices can take over 1000ms. On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 4:28 PM, Alex Kocharin <a...@kocharin.ru> wrote: > > Another implementation will go terribly slow. > > V8 is a browser thingy, and I'm sure it is as fast as it could possibly > be, because every millisecond counts there. > > So there is nothing wrong with V8. But there could be something wrong with > node.js itself. Think about hundreds of .js files it needs to read on > startup... "npm" itself do 964 system calls to various */node_modules/*.js > files when it's starting (use strace to check that). > > -- > // alex > > > 14.05.2013, 01:17, "Tim Caswell" <t...@creationix.com>: > > If you ever come across a JS engine that boots as fast as Lua, I'll port > node to it. On my raspberry pi and my various webos smart-phones, node > process booting takes over 1000ms, but lua is nearly instant. > > Actually, I think a new JS engine who's goal is to be light-weight would > be really neat actually. As long as it doesn't run too terribly slow. > > > On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 4:07 PM, Alex Kocharin <a...@kocharin.ru> wrote: > > > If we are talking about non-compatible solutions, I might as well use > python instead ;) > > -- > // alex > > > 14.05.2013, 01:04, "Tim Caswell" <t...@creationix.com>: > > Alex, I share your pain. That is why I made a version/port of node that > didn't use V8, but rather, the much lighter-weight luajit engine. It's at > luvit.io. (warning, not compatible with node.js code or ecosystem, just > the same idea / API style) > > > On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 6:21 AM, Alex Kocharin <a...@kocharin.ru> wrote: > > > Well, if NPK will be able to join all dependencies in one javascript file, > it will already be a big deal. On my system "npm" executable file takes > 1.153s to load from disk and 0.153s to load from cache. All binary > executables like "gpg" or "dpkg" take 0.004s to load. It's really annoying > sometimes... > > -- > // alex > > > 11.05.2013, 10:03, "Fred Chien" <cfsgh...@gmail.com>: > > Hi All, > > I am glade to introduce NPK, which is a packaging utlity for Node.js. :-) > > NPK aims to package project which is based on Node.js, and bundle all > JavaScript files to make all in one file, even protect source code. > > Here is repository at Github: > > https://github.com/cfsghost/npk > > You also can install it directly via npm: > > npm install npk -g > > BTW, We are now trying to support a feature that precompile JavaScript > files to be binary to speed up loading time of program of Node.js. > > Cheers, > Fred > > > -- > -- > Job Board: http://jobs.nodejs.org/ > Posting guidelines: > https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Mailing-List-Posting-Guidelines > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "nodejs" group. > To post to this group, send email to nodejs@googlegroups.com > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > 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