Node: Up and Running

Writing Code for Production

One of the challenges of writing a book is trying to explain things in the simplest way possible. That runs counter to showing techniques and functional code that you’d want to deploy. Although we should always strive to have the simplest, most understandable code possible, sometimes you need to do things that make code more robust or faster at the cost of making it less simple. This section provides guidance about how to harden the applications you deploy, which you can take with you as you explore upcoming chapters. This section is about writing code with maturity that will keep your application running long into the future. It’s not exhaustive, but if you write robust code, you won’t have to deal with so many maintenance issues. One of the trade-offs of Node’s single-threaded approach is a tendency to be brittle. These techniques help mitigate this risk.

Deploying a production application is not the same as running test programs on your laptop. Servers can have a wide variety of resource constraints, but they tend to have a lot more resources than the typical machine you would develop on. Typically, frontend servers have many more cores (CPUs) than laptop or desktop machines, but less hard drive space. They also have a lot of RAM. Node currently has some constraints, such as a maximum JavaScript heap size. This affects the way you deploy because you want to maximize the use of the CPUs and memory on the machine while using Node’s easy-to-program single-threaded ...