REST API: nodejs vs python

Question

I want to make Restful API for current PHP application with mongodb backend database.

NodeJS (express) vs Python (web.py), which is better for performance?

Can not find a out box solution to export Restful API in PHP. — Bruce Dou
– Bruce Dou, Commented Aug 9, 2011 at 8:41
Express has the advantage of asynchronous I/O. For database I/O it's better for performance. — generalhenry
– generalhenry, Commented Aug 9, 2011 at 18:47
I think you can use nodejs because it has more basic advantages like javascript object and json are easily convertible. Sometimes no need to parse result of rest api separately. — Saurabh Lende
– Saurabh Lende, Commented Aug 10, 2017 at 13:06

Paul Rumkin · Accepted Answer · 2021-07-07 15:05:14Z

4

So I found some speed test article. It's written in Russian so you may not able to read this. But you can look at the code for examples.

Here simple test results and short translation of explanation:

Python, Tornado

ab -n 10 -c 10 http://127.0.0.1:8888/
Time taken for tests:   20.078 seconds

Node.js

ab -n 10 -c 10 http://127.0.0.1:8000/
Time taken for tests:   2.007 seconds

There is no description of testing computer but it's not so matter.

The reason why Node.js is faster is that it uses nonblocking event loop while Python's time.sleep is blocking.

Since Python has received asyncio, the benchmarks from the article aren't complete without tests of asyncio.

answered Aug 10, 2011 at 13:43

Paul Rumkin

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1 Comment

This result doesn't seem to be realistic. Look at mrjoes.github.com/2011/12/15/sockjs-bench.html