60% of base node HTTP server performance

[slagiewka]

Hey,

I was running fastify benchmarks on node v24 (which show remarkable improvement for express) and I thought I would hook @whatwg-node/server since that's what runs my Yoga deployment and I was wondering how close to "bare" it its.

Benchmark server code:

const { createServer } = require("node:http");
const { createServerAdapter } = require("@whatwg-node/server");

createServer(
  createServerAdapter(() => {
    return new Response(JSON.stringify({ hello: "world" }), { status: 200 });
  }),
).listen(3000);

The result is worrying:

Would have any idea what's so slow about adopting node to WHATWG standards and if anything can still be done to improve it?

[ardatan]

You are using the native Response which is slower as we mention here;
https://github.com/ardatan/whatwg-node/tree/master/packages/fetch#why-fetch-api-and-why-this-ponyfill-in-general

We don't use the native Response or any other slow "native" implementation for Node, we use our own implementation of WHATWG @whatwg-node/fetch which uses @whatwg-node/node-fetch. So your comparison is actually not correct according to what we use in Yoga.
This is why we have this repo and the rest of the packages; https://github.com/ardatan/whatwg-node/tree/master/packages/node-fetch/src

You should use our ponyfill not the global one.

const { createServer } = require("node:http");
const { createServerAdapter } = require("@whatwg-node/server");
const { Response } = require("@whatwg-node/fetch");

createServer(
  createServerAdapter(() => Response.json({ hello: 'world' })),
).listen(3000);

[slagiewka]

You're correct, it's better indeed.

I'll rerun all of them later, but in general this is way less problematic! 😉

[ardatan]

And another thing about this repo; https://github.com/fastify/benchmarks/blob/main/benchmarks/fastify.cjs

It uses JSON Schema to serialize the data using fast-json-stringify instead of JSON.stringify as in other examples;
https://github.com/fastify/benchmarks/blob/main/benchmarks/node-http.cjs#L5

So in order to make it fair, I think all should use JSON.stringify.

[slagiewka]

I'm aware, but I'm comparing to node-http which is the bare HTTP server. It uses JSON.stringify: https://github.com/fastify/benchmarks/blob/1c2228d1a36c847b346defe2dbdabfacc1b501d7/benchmarks/node-http.cjs#L5