newton-peixoto

newton-peixoto

Speed difference between chunk http response and non-chuncked

Hello everyone I’m studying about http streams and I notice a big difference in performance when returning everything at once and when streaming and that made me think if streaming a big file is really worth it or if there is something wrong with my implementation (most likely that haha) So if anyone could help me understand this situation I’d appreciate a lot. Thanks

non-stream implementation

  get "/no-stream" do
    pokemons = File.read!("file.json")
    conn |> send_resp(200, pokemons)
  end

Stream implementation :

  get "/" do

    conn = conn
    |> put_resp_content_type("text/event-stream")
    |> put_resp_header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "*")
    |> send_chunked(200)

    File.stream!("file.json")
    |> Jaxon.Stream.from_enumerable
    |> Jaxon.Stream.query([:root, :all])
    |> Stream.map(fn element ->
     {:ok, pokemon}  = Jason.encode(element)
      conn |> chunk(pokemon <> "\n")
    end )
    |> Stream.run

    conn
  end

As you can see the stream implementation has a latency MUCH higher even though the memory peak is a little bit lower. The question here is trying to understand if this is normal or if I messed up somehow I understand if is not possible to achieve the same latency as File.read! but the difference here is so high that made me wonder if something if off

BTW: the lib used to run the load test is called hey

Most Liked

kip

kip

ex_cldr Core Team

When I think about when to stream I think of three cases:

  1. Time-to-first pixel is more important that absolute throughput. By streaming the user may be able to see something after the first chunk. In non-streaming the whole content has to arrive first. Very use case dependent.

  2. The content is being streamed from an external source (like S3) to Elixir and then transformed before sending to the HTTP client. In this case streaming may be more memory efficient and the stream-in/stream-out may manage the upstream latency and bandwidth better.

  3. The size of the content to be sent is non-trivial in terms of memory availability on the Elixir system. (as you’ve already pointed out).

I appreciate some of this may be more theoretical benefit rather than practical benefit so as always, testing and measuring is important.

kwando

kwando

Looks like your streaming version does more work tbh, parsing and encoding JSON…

Also I believe send_file would be even faster :slight_smile:

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