[ANN] PowerHouse 0.1

[Kevin Ingwersen (Ingwie Phoenix)]

Hey everyone!

This is my first release to this mailing list - so hopefully I get this right. =)

I’d like to present to you PowerHouse, a NodeJS module that enhances scaling across processes in an easy fashion, that does not require a cli program or much of a restructure in your app. In fact, you can just drop it into your app and toy around and find a configurationt hat satisfies your needs!

What PowerHouse does:

- It helps you scale your application across processes in an easy way.

- Give you the opportunity to create a child process that can idle alongside your app just fine. You could talk to it using Redis Pub/Sub.

- Allow you to use sticky sessions. For instance, Socket.IO needs ~3 requests to perform the handshake. If only one request hits a different worker than the one the handshake was started in, you will run into issues! PowerHouse can help you out there. It sticks your client to a server and keeps them that way.

- It can create a net.Server on the main process and forward the incoming connection to one worker process at a time. This is an alternative way of balancing requests. You could use this as a load-balancer or proxy mechanism, maybe.

- Restart a worker that died.

What PowerHouse DOES NOT do:

- Require you to use a CLI application.

- Needing to inject code into yours.

- A special app layout. You decide how it’s laid out, no questions asked.

- Interfere with the rest of your stuff. All it wants is to be called once on a worker so that handlers are set up and alike.

You can find it here: https://github.com/IngwiePhoenix/PowerHouse

I’d be happy about feedback, and ideas!

It should be noted that the sticky session doesn’t work just yet. I have to yet implement it, but the base is already present! You also currently can not hot-reload workers. Thus there is no mechanism to close sockets that are remaining from a dead process.

You can see a test in the test/ folder.

Kind regards,

Ingwie!