javascript - Nodejs loopback TCP latency 1-2ms?

Question

When creating a TCP server/client connected through the loopback address in NodeJS, I'm getting 1-2 ms round trip times for simple, low-data messages.

I don't have too much context for how fast Node should be, but it seems that it should be <1ms as there aren't very many operations going on and loopback ping times are in the microseconds.

Is there some buffering built into the net package that I'm missing, or is this latency to be expected?

Server:

var net = require('net');

var server = net.createServer((socket) => {
  socket.setNoDelay();

  setInterval(()=>{
    socket.write(process.hrtime.bigint().toString());
  }, 1000)



  socket.on('data', (data)=>{
    console.log("Completed in: " + parseFloat((process.hrtime.bigint() - BigInt(data))/BigInt(1e3))/1000 + "ms")
  })

});

server.listen(1337, '127.0.0.1');

Client:

var net = require('net');

var client = new net.Socket();
client.connect(1337, '127.0.0.1', () => {
    console.log('Connected');

});

client.on('data', (data) => {
    client.write(data.toString());
});

client.on('close', () => {
    console.log('Connection closed');
});

Answer 1

This is expected behavior. I'm sure there's ways to optimize the interpreter, but if your use case needs real time response times (<1ms) maybe you should change your tech stack to some other language that can use cpu, multithreading, io, etc more efficiently.