Baby Names Analyzer

Description

The baby names analyzer is used to demonstrate the abilities of performance tuning and benchmarking in node.js.

Features

• provides count of names beginning with a certain prefix

Tools Used

• eslint

Instructions

The goal is to run three different experiments on how to tune the performance of this simple application. 0. Establish baseline of initial implementation.

1. Add a cache for the data lookup. Baseline.
2. Try re-writing the processing logic for the filter using map and reduce. Baseline.
3. See if adding a data structure would improve performance further. Baseline.

Sample baselines can be found under /performance-metrics.

Setup

1. npm i
2. Ensure that autocannon is installed (npm i -g autocannon). This tool is used for load testing.
3. Ensure that 0x is installed (npm i -g 0x). This tool captures flamegraphs for performance tuning.

Establishing a baseline

1. Set NODE_ENV=production npm start to begin the application in production mode. There are some times production optimizations in node. The application is now started.
2. Run the autocannon tool to establish a baseline for performance: autocannon -c 100 http://localhost:3000/filter?prefix=a

Creating a flamegraph

1. Run the application using 0x: NODE_ENV=production 0x index.js
2. Run the autocannon tool: autocannon -c 100 http://localhost:3000/filter?prefix=a
3. Send a SIGEXIT when the autocannon process is complete: Ctrl+C

Miscellaneous

Data

From Government Catalog

• columns in data set:
  • Year of Birth
  • Gender
  • Ethnicity
  • Child's First Name
  • Count
  • Rank