Toward an Understanding of the Tradeoffs of Adopting the MEAN Web Server Stack

Abstract

In the past decade, the performance of web services has been enhanced via scale-up and scale-out methods, which increase available system resources, and also by improvements in database performance. As cloud technology continues to rise in popularity, storage and compute services are reaching unprecedented scale, with great scrutiny being turned to the performance tradeoffs of the web application server stacks. In particular, the MEAN (MongoDB, Express.js, AngularJS, and Node.js) web server stack is increasingly popular in the computing industry, yet has largely escaped the focus of formal benchmarking efforts. In this work, we compare MEAN to its more entrenched competitor, the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) web server stack, the most widely distributed web platform in production. We herein describe the design, execution, and results of a number of benchmark tests constructed and executed to facilitate direct comparison between Node.js and Apache/PHP, the web server applications of these stacks. We investigate each web server’s ability to handle heavy static file service, remote database interaction, and common compute-bound tasks. Analysis of our results indicates that Node.js outperforms the Apache/PHP by a considerable margin in all single-application web service scenarios, and performs as well as Apache/PHP under heterogeneous server workloads. We extend our understanding of the MEAN stack’s performance potential by exploring the performance and memory tradeoffs of Angularizing the Mongo-Express web application, a database administration dashboard for MongoDB. We find that porting Mongo-Express to MEAN’s AngularJS provides up to a 4x improvement in document read bandwidth and up to almost 2.2x improvement in collection read bandwidth, at a cost of roughly double the client memory footprint.