Deno vs Node performance: API Proxy

Mayank Choubey

Published in

Tech Tonic

4 min readDec 4, 2021

Introduction

This article is a part of the Deno vs Node performance series. The earlier articles are:

This time, we’ll see the performance comparison of an HTTP server that acts as an API proxy. The server sends another HTTP request to a mock server, gets a response containing a random ID, parses it, and sends the random ID in response to its caller.

Configuration

Environment

The performance comparison is executed on the following environment:

System: MacBook Pro with M1 processor & 16G of memory
Local: The SUT and tester are on the same system
Deno version: 1.16.4
Node version: 17.2.0

Test data

There is a mock API service that’s going to be used by both Deno & Node.js proxies. The mock API service generates a random UUID and sends it back to the caller. The mock API service is written in Deno. Here is the code of the mock API service:

import { listenAndServe } from "https://deno.land/std/http/mod.ts";listenAndServe(
  ":3001",
  () =>
    new Response(JSON.stringify({ randomId: crypto.randomUUID() }),{
      headers: {
        "content-type": "application/json",
      },
    }),
);

Code

Here is the code of an API proxy server that

Receives a request from the caller (no body in the request)
Sends an HTTP request to the mock server
Gets a response back from the mock server & parses it to get randomId
Sends the randomId to its caller in a JSON encoded repsonse body

The Node.js proxy is built only on native code, while the Deno proxy uses listenAndServe from Deno’s standard library. The listenAndServe API is recommended for most of the users, rather than using a combination of listen & serveHttp.