This article is Part 2 of Best Practices for Production setup of Nodejs Application. The focus of this article is on sharing best practices for optimizing performance and ensuring reliability during the development phase.

Ensuring performance and reliability are critical aspects when deploying applications in a production environment. Optimizing performance involves efficient resource utilization, minimizing response times, and handling high user loads effectively. Reliability entails robust error handling, graceful failure recovery, and implementing fault-tolerant measures to ensure uninterrupted operation.

Production Environment Best Practices

Here are few things to do during the development to enhance your application’s performance:

  1. Use gzip compression
  2. Always Use Asynchronous Functions
  3. Do logging correctly
  4. Handle exceptions and errors properly
  5. Watch Out For Memory Leaks

production best practices

Use gzip compression

Gzip compression is a widely used technique in web development to reduce the size of response bodies sent from a web server to a client.

Implementing compression at the reverse proxy level is a recommended approach for enabling gzip compression in a high-traffic website in production. By configuring compression at the reverse proxy, you can centralize and streamline the compression process, reducing the overhead on your application servers.

Nginx, a popular web server and reverse proxy server, provides the ngx_http_gzip_module that allows you to enable gzip compression easily.

Always Use Asynchronous Functions

Synchronous functions and methods block the execution process until they complete their task and return a result. This means that when a synchronous function is called, the entire program or thread will be paused until the function completes its operation. In high-traffic websites or any application that requires handling multiple requests concurrently, the use of synchronous functions can severely impact performance.

Asynchronous operations allow multiple tasks to be executed concurrently without blocking the execution flow. This means that while one task is in progress, other tasks can be initiated and processed simultaneously. As a result, the application can handle a larger number of requests efficiently and improve its performance.

Do logging correctly

Logging is an essential practice in software development and serves two primary purposes: debugging and logging application activity.

  • Debugging: Logging is commonly used as a tool for debugging and troubleshooting issues in software applications. Developers strategically place log statements throughout their code to capture relevant information about the program’s execution.

  • Logging Application Activity: Logging is not only useful for debugging but also for tracking and recording the activity and behavior of an application in production environments. By logging important events, actions, errors, or warnings, developers can gain insights into how the application is performing, identify patterns, detect anomalies, and monitor its health and usage.

Use logging libraries like Pino or Winston or Bunyan. For detailed post on Pino library read more at Pino with Logrotate is the best way for managing logs in your Nodejs application.

Handle exceptions and errors properly

Unhandled exceptions/errors in a Node.js application can lead to crashes and make the application go offline. Handling exceptions properly is crucial for maintaining the stability and availability of your application. Here are two techniques commonly used for handling exceptions/errors in Node.js applications:

  • try-catch: The try-catch statement allows you to catch and handle exceptions within a specific block of code. By wrapping potentially error-prone code within a try block and catching any exceptions in a catch block, you can prevent the unhandled exception from crashing the application. Here’s an example:
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try {
  // Code that might throw an exception
} catch (error) {
  // Handle the exception
  console.error('An error occurred:', error);
  // Take appropriate actions, such as logging, sending notifications, or gracefully shutting down the application
}
  • Promises: If you’re working with asynchronous operations, you can handle exceptions using promises. Promises provide a way to handle both resolved and rejected states, allowing you to catch and handle any exceptions that occur during the execution of a promise chain. Here’s an example:
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async function someAsyncOperation() {
  try {
    // Code that might throw an exception
    await someAsyncFunction();
  } catch (error) {
    // Handle the exception
    console.error('An error occurred:', error);
    // Take appropriate actions
  }
}

someAsyncOperation();

By using async/await and wrapping the asynchronous code within a try-catch block, you can capture and handle exceptions that occur during the execution of the promise chain.

Watch Out For Memory Leaks

Memory leaks can be silent and difficult to detect, and it’s always preferable to prevent them rather than dealing with the consequences. Memory leaks can cause a steady growth of memory consumption in your Node.js application over time, leading to performance degradation, increased resource usage, and potentially crashes.

Preventing and detecting memory leaks in Node.js applications requires careful attention to memory management and following best practices. This is why you need use monitoring agent to collect and look into metrics about process and heap memory.

Conclusion

Performance and reliability are crucial aspects of production-deployed applications. Optimizing performance involves efficient resource utilization, minimizing response times, and effectively handling high user loads.

In this article, the focus was more on best practices during the course of development phase. By prioritizing both performance and reliability, organizations can deliver a seamless user experience and maintain the stability of their deployed applications.

✨ Thank you for reading and I hope you find it helpful. I sincerely request for your feedback in the comment’s section.