TechFindings

I have experimented a bit with Node.js and Raspberry Pi lately, and I have found the performance… surprisingly bad. So I decided to run some standard tests: benchmark-octane (v9).

Octane is essentially run like:

$ npm install benchmark-octane
$ cd node_modules/benchmark-octane
$ node run.js

The distilled result of Octane is a total run time and a score. Here are a few results:

                         OS             Node.js                   Time    Score
QNAP TS-109 500MHz       Debian        v0.10.29 (Debian)         3350s      N/A
Raspberry Pi v1 700MHz   OpenWrt BB    v0.10.35 (self built)     2267s      140
Raspberry Pi v1 700MHz   Raspbian       v0.6.19 (Raspbian)       2083s      N/A
Raspberry Pi v1 700MHz   Raspbian       v0.12.2 (self built)     2176s      104
Eee701 Celeron 900Mhz    Xubuntu       v0.10.25 (Ubuntu)          171s     1655
Athlon II X2@3Hz         Xubuntu       v0.10.25 (Ubuntu)           49s     9475
MacBook Air i5@1.4Ghz    Mac OS X      v0.10.35 (pkgsrc)           47s    10896
HP 2560p i7@2.7Ghz       Xubuntu       v0.10.25 (Ubuntu)           41s    15450

Score N/A means that one test failed and there was no final score.

When I first saw the RPi performance I thought I had done something wrong building (using a cross compiler) Node.js myself for RPi and OpenWRT. However Node.js with Raspbian is basically not faster, and also RPi ARMv6 with FPU is not much faster than the QNAP ARMv5 without FPU.

I think the Eee701 serves as a good baseline here. At first glance, possible reasons for the RPi underperformance relative to the Celeron are:

• Smaller cache (16kb of L1 cache and L2 only available to GPU, i Read) compared to Celeron (512k)
• Bad or not well utilised FPU (but there at least is one on the RPi)
• Node.js (V8) less optimized for ARM

I found that I have benchmarked those to CPUs against each other before. That time the Celeron was twice as fast as the RPi, and the FPU of the RPi performed decently. Blaming the small cache makes more sense to me, than blaming the people who implemented ARM support in V8.

The conclusion is that Raspberry Pi (v1 at least) is extremely slow running Node.js. Other benchmarks indicate that RPi v2 is significantly faster.