Node Cookbook

Optimizing performance with streaming

Caching content certainly improves upon reading a file from disk for every request. However, with fs.readFile, we are reading the whole file into memory before sending it out in response. For better performance, we can stream a file from disk and pipe it directly to the response object, sending data straight to the network socket one piece at a time.

Getting ready

We are building on our code from the last example, so let's get server.js, index.html, styles.css, and script.js ready.

How to do it...

We will be using fs.createReadStream to initialize a stream, which can be piped to the response object. In this case, implementing fs.createReadStream within our cacheAndDeliver function isn't ideal because the event ...