Node.js App takes 4-5 seconds to get response from Salesforce

Question

I have a node.js canvas app that queries salesforce for accounts and there are only 10 of them , but for some reason it takes about 4-5 seconds before the response comes back. I have used both nforce and node-salesforce modules for this and both are taking the same time.

Example code:

nforce

var query = 'SELECT Name, Id FROM Account';
org.query(query, auth, callback(err, resp) {
  if(!err) console.log(resp)
});

and node-salesforce

conn.query("SELECT Id, Name FROM Account", function(err, result) {
  if (!err) { return console.log(result); }
});

The auth details are already recorded, so no login is required.

I have tried calling other APIs and again it takes 4-5 seconds.

Cheers

Answer 1

So I just ran some benchmarks in nforce version 0.3.0. I now see what you see. It seems to me that the initial request to the API after an extended period of API inactivity returns a slower response from the platform. I'm not exactly sure why this happens, but all of the subsequent requests are averaging around .325s after the initial request that took > 9s! Here are some tests that I ran. The code in nforce.js is the same as your example.

λ: time node nforce.js
real    0m9.608s
user    0m0.136s
sys     0m0.023s
~/dev/projects/node/nforce-bench
λ: time node nforce.js
real    0m0.324s
user    0m0.133s
sys     0m0.021s
~/dev/projects/node/nforce-bench
λ: time node nforce.js
real    0m0.323s
user    0m0.137s
sys     0m0.022s
~/dev/projects/node/nforce-bench
λ: time node nforce.js
real    0m0.329s
user    0m0.136s
sys     0m0.023s

Curl yielded roughly the same result.

Hypothesis:

What makes the most sense here is that the API is doing some sort of authentication caching. This is a pretty common practice. Your initial request takes a while because your token must be checked on the backend as it's not yet in the cache. After that initial request, your auth is cached at the API level for speed in subsequent requests. After a period of inactivity or after the max size of the cache is reached and yours was the least recently used (LRU caching), your access token is flushed from the cache.