Node.Cs

Introduction

This is a project developed to copy in .Net the behaviour of Node.Js. It's not a direct port since simply I prefer the approach proposed here :) . Nothing against Node.Js developers, i love their work!

The idea is to leverage on the usage of "Coroutines" with the simple implementation offered by the C# IEnumerable and IEnumerator. I could have made something based on the new await and async, but I like to loose myself in the darkest and deepest forrest, for the sake of knowledge... or masochism sometimes.

The result was to develope a complete web server and to port MVC Music Store to this webserver.

The sample can be downloaded from NodeCsMusicStore repository on Github

Result, with JMeter and 150 concurrent users on 4 pages accessing the local database on an i7 quad core with 8 Gb ram. With 160000 request in total. Here you can get the test i used. The IIS version is the original music store, with all updated (MVC, JQuery) removing the SqlCe database (it reached 90 req/second with that...) and moving it to the database used as standard (with the System.Data.Entity.SqlServer.SqlProviderServices) with a file based data source.

All this without any kind of cache enabled.

• CPU IIS:100% NODE.CS:35%
• Req/sec IIS:150 NODE.CS:360
• Errors IIS:0 NODE.CS:0
• RAM, Max IIS:230Mb NODE.CS:37Mb

For some other results you can check this article from Eli Weinstock-Herman.

Just try it at home!

Why

Well, firstly I was curious to understand if the whole thing was feasible without using the new async and await C# keywords. Having seen node.js and loving it's way of using resources, i thought to do something like that in C#, adding a plugin based infrastructure and the support for the already defined .NET MVC structure.

I thought to reuse part of the Cassini project, but there were too much refactoring involved. And i started something new, thanks to the HttpListener and the RazorEngine

After this (being really interested in LockFree data structures and, in general, to thread safe data structures, i thought that it would be nice to have a system where, for example:

• Function x ask to download a web page, http://foo/bar
  • It asks for the page on a local cache, and pass to the cache a Lambda to get the data
  • Function x is stopped until the Lambda is completed, with the data
• Function y ask http://foo/bar, but the previous Lambda is not yet completed.
  • It asks for the page on the local cache, but the cache realizes that it is doing a request for the page
  • Function y is stopped until the Function y lambda is completed
• When the lambda completes, both function x and y takes a copy of the retrieved data. BUT
  • Only on http request had been made
  • Thanks to the lock free data structures used (Queues, essentially) no context switch was needed
  • No CPU had been wasted started stopping tasks and threads

All i did was something like what is made by the async/await keywords, but extending it beyond the tasks, like node,js does( Decompiling Async/Await written by the author of IlSpy).

Features

Release 1.1.0

• Core
  • Easy porting from existing MVC controllers
  • Coroutine based operations, no context switches
  • Heavy usage of CAS atomic operations
  • Easy Async and task operations
  • Predisposition for usage with IOC containers like Castle Windsor
  • File upload
  • Sessions with support for custom session storage
  • Cookies
  • Redirects
  • Automatic binding on controller parameters
  • Support for all major verbs
  • Automatic caching of static files
  • Multple overlappable sources for files
  • MVC like routing system
  • Form and Basic authentication method with custom data provider for authentication
  • Embedded performance monitor (eventually connectable with the Windows native monitor)
  • MVC like action and global filters
  • Use of embedded resources as source of static and dynamic resources
  • Small memory/CPU footprint
  • Capable of thousands of concurrent connections
  • Automatic recycle when reaching too high resources usage (configurable)
  • Logging
• EntityFramework Module
  • Embeddable as nuget plugin
  • Offering a custom code first data provider for authentication
• Admin Module
  • Embeddable as nuget plugin
  • Simple administration console
  • Visualization of all statistics
• Razor Module
  • Embeddable as nuget plugin
  • Support for all the major helpers (UrlHelper and HtmlHelper) for model and form binding
  • Support for _ViewStart and _Layut
  • Support for RenderPartial and RenderAction
  • Support for ChildOnly actions

Release 1.2.0

• Bugs
  • Css mime not set
  • XmlResponse accepted only strings
• Quality
  • Improved testability (splitting everything)
  • Totally changed the network-related section to support websocket
• General
  • Visual Studio Template now has all jquery/css included..

Milestones

Feel free to ask (with an explanation) to change my priorities! All these are more or less indipendents between them

• Release 2.0

  • Logging level by configuration
  • Routing through controllers attributes
  • WebSocket
  • Custom Castle Windsor module
  • Binaries cache with precompiled pages
  • NTLM1 Authentication with custom auth provider
  • Reduce recycle times
  • Enhance administration console
  • Porting to Mono
  • Optimize razor module loading

• Release 3.0

  • NTLM2 Authentication
  • Enhance administration console
  • ... more to come

Enjoy!

Credits

• Antaris for the RazorEngine.
• Thorsten Bruning for its Universal Type Converter.
• Jon Galloway for the MVC Music Store The base i used to define the minimum value.

Last modified on: February 28, 2014