NodeJS on Ubuntu slow? - performance

Question

I just installed Ubuntu 10.10 server with NodeJS 0.4.6 using this guide: http://www.codediesel.com/linux/installing-node-js-on-ubuntu-10-04/ on my laptop:
Acer 5920G (Intel Core 2 Duo (2ghz), 4 gb ram)
After that I created a little test how nodejs would perform and wrote this little hello world script:
var http = require('http');
http.createServer(function(req, res) {
res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/html'});
res.write('Hello World');
res.end();
}).listen(8080);
Now to test the performance i used Apache Benchmark on Windows with the following settings
ab -r -c 1000 -n 10000 http://192.168.1.103:8000/
But the results are very low compared to http://zgadzaj.com/benchmarking-node-js-testing-performance-against-apache-php/
Server Software:
Server Hostname: 192.168.1.103
Server Port: 8000
Document Path: /
Document Length: 12 bytes
Concurrency Level: 1000
Time taken for tests: 23.373 seconds
Complete requests: 10000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 760000 bytes
HTML transferred: 120000 bytes
Requests per second: 427.84 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 2337.334 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 2.337 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 31.75 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 1 1.3 1 28
Processing: 1236 2236 281.2 2327 2481
Waiting: 689 1522 169.5 1562 1785
Total: 1237 2238 281.2 2328 2484
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 2328
66% 2347
75% 2358
80% 2364
90% 2381
95% 2397
98% 2442
99% 2464
100% 2484 (longest request)
Any one got a clue? (Compile, Hardware problem, Drivers, Configuration, Slow script)
Edit 4-17 14:04 GMT+1
I am testing the machine over 1Gbit local connection. When I ping it gives me 0 ms so that would be good I guess. When I issue the apachebenchmark on my Windows 7 machine the CPU raises to 100% :|

Answer 1

It seems like you are running the test over a medium with a high Bandwidth-Delay Product; in your case, high latency (>1s). Assuming 1s delay, a 100MBit link and 76 Bytes per request, you need more than 150000 requests in parallel to saturate it.
First, test the latency (with ping or so). Also, watch the CPU and network usage on all participating machines. This will give you an indication of the bottleneck in your tests. What are the benchmark results for an Apache webserver?
Also, it could be hardware/driver problem. Watch dmesg on both machines. And although it's probably not the reason for this specific problem, don't forget to change the CPU speed governor to performance on both machines!