HyperExpress: High Performance Node.js Webserver

Powered by uWebSockets.js

Motivation

HyperExpress aims to be a simple yet perfomant HTTP & Websocket Server. Combined with the power of uWebsockets.js, a Node.js binding of uSockets written in C++, HyperExpress allows developers to unlock higher throughput for their web applications with their existing hardware. This can allow many web applications to become much more performant on optimized data serving endpoints without having to scale hardware.

Some of the prominent features implemented are:

• Simplified HTTP & Websocket API
• Global & Route-Specific Middlewares Support
• Modular Routers Support
• Server-Sent Events Support
• HTTP & Websocket Streaming Support
• Performant Multipart File Uploading
• Global Error/Event Handlers
• Cryptographically Secure Cookie Signing/Authentication
• ExpressJS API Compatibility Through Shared Methods/Properties
• TypeScript Types Support

Documentation

HyperExpress requires Node.js version 14+ and can be installed using Node Package Manager (npm).

npm i hyper-express

• See > [Examples & Snippets] for small and easy-to-use snippets with HyperExpress.
• See > [Server] for creating a webserver and working with the Server component.
• See > [Middlewares] for working with global and route-specific Middlewares in HyperExpress.
• See > [Router] for working with the modular Router component.
• See > [Request] for working with the Request component made available through handlers.
• See > [Response] for working with the Response component made available through handlers.
• See > [MultipartField] for working with multipart requests and File Uploading in HyperExpress.
• See > [SSEventStream] for working with Server-Sent Events based streaming in HyperExpress.
• See > [Websocket] for working with Websockets in HyperExpress.
• See > [SessionEngine] for working with cookie based web Sessions in HyperExpress.
• See > [LiveDirectory] for implementing static file/asset serving functionality into HyperExpress.

What's Different?

While there may be other uWebsockets.js based packages available, HyperExpress differentiates itself in the following ways:

• Instantaneous Request Handling
  • HyperExpress implements a request handling model similar to fetch where a request is passed almost instantly to the route handler and the request body can be asynchronously dowloaded/accessed. This behavior allows for aborting of a request and potentially saving on memory usage for endpoints that deal with relatively larger body sizes as the body simply won't be downloaded into memory without access.
• High Maintainability
  • Whether you decide to develop on your own fork or expand upon HyperExpress through middlewares, You will be greeted with a concise codebase with descriptive logic comments, JSDoc and Typescript types allowing for high maintainability.
• Lightweight Package Size
  • HyperExpress is extremely lightweight while implementing almost all of the core functionalities of a webserver providing users with flexibility.

Benchmarks

Below benchmark results were derived using the autocannon HTTP benchmarking utility. The benchmark source code is included in this repository in the benchmarks folder.

CLI Command

This command simulates a high stress situation where 2500 unique visitors visit your website at the same time and their browsers on average make 4 pipelined requests per TCP connection sustained for 30 seconds.

autocannon -c 2500 -d 30 -p 4 http://HOST:PORT/benchmark

Environment Specifications

• Machine: Ubuntu 20.04 | 1 vCPU | 1GB Mem | 32GB Nvme | Vultr @ $6/Month
• Node: v16.0.0
• Method: Two rounds; one to warm-up, one to measure
• Response Body: Small HTML page with a dynamic timestamp generated with Date. See more in HTML Test.
• Linux Optimizations: None.

Benchmark Results

Note! uWebsockets.js and HyperExpress were bottlenecked by the network speed of the Vultr instance. While, Fastify and Express were bottlenecked by high CPU usage resulting in a much lower throughput with relatively higher latency numbers. For average use cases, all webservers below can serve requests at lower than 50ms latency.

Version Requests/s Latency Throughput/s

uWebsockets.js 20.0.0 197,223 441 ms 106 Mb/s

HyperExpress 5.7.0 195,413 411 ms 106 Mb/s

nanoexpress 5.1.1 196,828 421 ms 106 Mb/s

Fastify 3.22.0 42,332 571 ms 26 Mb/s

Express 4.17.1 5,922 1860 ms 3.9 Mb/s

Testing Changes

To run HyperExpress functionality tests locally on your machine, you must follow the steps below.

1. Clone the HyperExpress repository to your machine.
2. Initialize and pull any submodule(s) which are used throughout the tests.
3. Run npm install in the root of the HyperExpress repository.
4. Run npm install in the /tests directory.
5. Execute the /tests/index.js file to perform tests.

License

MIT