Building a Presentation Tier, Hunting Memory Leaks

The Seattle Node.js Meetup is pleased announce our next meetup on Wednesday, July 23, 2014 with talks on migrating application stacks to Node.js and high-performance node. We’ll get pizza and beverages thanks to our new host Cobalt as we take things to SoDo for the evening.

As always, you can find all things Seattle Node.js-related at the group website: http://seanode.github.io/ . And you can reach out to us via email at seattlenode@gmail.com or Twitter at @seattlenode (https://twitter.com/seattlenode).

See you soon!

Agenda

• 6:30 - 7:00pm: Start with pizza and beer, courtesy of Cobalt.

• 7:00pm - 8:15pm: Listen to our talks and panels.

• 8:15pm - on: Mingle, mix, chat things Node.js-related and more as we wind down.

Talks

Tracking down memory leaks in production.

Jason Wilson - Nordstrom

After a successful launch of our Recommendo API we noticed that all was not well in the world. High memory consumption and swap usage in our production environment was resulting in service timeouts and degraded performance. Learn how we used heapdump, mdb, node-memwatch, and a little luck to take our node rss from 1.1gigs to 87mb.

Jason is a developer in the Nordstrom Data Lab focusing on infrastructure development for Nordstrom’s next generation personalization platform. Before joining Nordstrom Jason held various engineering roles in military / defense and gaming.

Node-ification Justification - Node.js in the presentation layer

John Cokos - UI Engineer, ADP|Cobalt

Panel: Jason Taylor, Benjamin Waite, Brett Ritter, Fumiyo Conway-Yasuyama, Ben Hakala (Senior UI Engineers at ADP|Cobalt)

Our core product is a CMS which powers over 20,000 websites from a common codebase through a (mostly) common theming system constructed using variously sized “widgets” of disparate content. Currently, this is all rendered through a massive, very tightly coupled Java application. Our challenge was to decouple the presentation tier from the business tier. Node.js was the clear choice to tackle the problem set. We’ve since developed a completely isological system that not only executes the same code on both the server and the client, but can also render content at either end.

As part of the rollout strategy, we are delivering a subset of this technology as an in-house development environment for widget authorship for both the Node.js and Java based systems. In addition to a massive increase in productivity and bliss, we’re using this system as a way of slowly indoctrinating the current developer community and 3rd parties in the usage patterns for our new layout and content system and getting a foothold into the production systems with Node.js.

We are looking forward to showing off the developers toolkit, sharing the process that we’re going through and taking a glimpse into our next generation layout engine, powered by Node.js.

Venue / Sponsor

Cobalt (http://www.cobalt.com/) has graciously agreed to host the event and provide food and tasty beverages. Cobalt’s offices are located at: 605 Fifth Avenue South, 9th Floor Seattle, WA 98104-3889.

Parking / Transportation Hints

Cobalt is right at Union Station. The Mariners game will be over by the time we get started, so the garage should be wide open. Note that parking at Union Station is not cheap and the important thing to keep in mind is that they lock it up tight at 9:00 pm sharp, so if you're not out, you're in all night (and they will charge like $75 the next day). There are a few street parking lots around the building, so Cobalt recommends folks use those if you want to linger and talk after the talks are all done.

So, may be a great opportunity to consider public transportation, Uber, etc.!