Node Fast Buffer

A faster way of handling Buffers, or so I say.

Notice: This is NOT a real buffer. But works faster for certain use cases.

Performance

Node Buffer

new Buffer from buffer     x 260,001 ops/sec ±2.06% (79 runs sampled)
new Buffer from byte array x 215,698 ops/sec ±2.31% (73 runs sampled)
new Buffer from size       x 277,193 ops/sec ±2.09% (91 runs sampled)

Fast Buffer

new fastBuffer from buffer     x   189,329 ops/sec ±2.73% (74 runs sampled)
new fastBuffer from byte array x 3,486,441 ops/sec ±0.28% (93 runs sampled)
new fastBuffer from size       x 1,726,193 ops/sec ±0.40% (97 runs sampled)

Faster Buffer

new fasterBuffer from buffer     x    212,569 ops/sec ±2.41% (81 runs sampled)
new fasterBuffer from byte array x  7,866,879 ops/sec ±0.19% (99 runs sampled)
new fasterBuffer from size       x 14,760,543 ops/sec ±0.42% (100 runs sampled)

Installing

$ npm install fast-buffer --save

Installing the latest version

$ npm install git+https://github.com/majimboo/node-fast-buffer.git

or for those without git

$ npm install http://github.com/majimboo/node-fast-buffer/tarball/master

Usage - fastBuffer

var fastBuffer = require('fast-buffer').fastBuffer;
var buf = new fastBuffer(5);
buf.writeUInt8(0x01);
buf.writeUInt8(0x02);
buf.writeUInt8(0x03);
buf.writeUInt8(0x04);
buf.writeUInt8(0x05);

var buf = new fastBuffer([0x01, 0x02, 0x03, 0x04, 0x05]);
var buf = new fastBuffer(new Buffer([0x01, 0x02, 0x03, 0x04, 0x05]));

// create new buffer
var buf = new fastBuffer([0x05, 0x07, 0x02, 0x05, 0x09]);

// do some processing like 
// - encrypt the buffer
for (var i = 0; i < buf.length; i++) {
  buf[i] ^= 0x02;
  buf[i] ^= 0x03;
  buf[i] ^= 0x01;
  buf[i] ^= 0x02;
  buf[i] ^= 0x03;
}
// - append the size
var buf_w_size = new fastBuffer([0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00]);
buf.copy(buf_w_size, 1);
buf_w_size.writeUInt8(buf_w_size.length, 0);

// send data
socket.write(buf_w_size.encode());

Usage - fasterBuffer

var fasterBuffer = require('fast-buffer').fasterBuffer;
var mainBuf = new fasterBuffer(5);
var buf = mainBuf.bytes;
buf.writeUInt8(0x01);
buf.writeUInt8(0x02);
buf.writeUInt8(0x03);
buf.writeUInt8(0x04);
buf.writeUInt8(0x05);

var buf = new fasterBuffer([0x01, 0x02, 0x03, 0x04, 0x05]);
var buf = new fasterBuffer(new Buffer([0x01, 0x02, 0x03, 0x04, 0x05]));

Problem

I needed a fast protocol for a MMOG server I was developing in Node.JS. My workflow was creating buffers, writing bits into it, encrypting, then sent the data with socket.write().

I noticed the performance difference when I was doing some benchmark which results can be seen here.

How slow?

var buf = new Buffer([0x00, 0x01, 0x03, 0x04]);
socket.write(buf);

When benchmarked gives:

buffer x 112,474 ops/sec ±11.07% (52 runs sampled)

Solution

As UTF-8 strings, it would be like

var buf = '\x00\x01\x03\x04';
socket.write(buf);

Now let us see some benchmark:

utf-8  x 1,629,796 ops/sec ±29.13% (54 runs sampled)

You can try the benchmark here by running

node benchmark/buffer-vs-utf8

As you can see, there is a huge difference in speed, using utf-8 strings gives you about x14 more performance than using buffers.

WORK IN PROGRESS - TBC#