What is EventLoop? How to test the performance of Node or page

Everyone should know about the Event Loop mechanism. This article uses EventLoop to make an interesting code for detecting node or page performance. By the way, I introduce EventLoop. I hope it will be helpful to everyone!

Event Loop

Everyone should know the mechanism of Event Loop. Let me repeat the summary first.

The Event Loop of Node.js is different from that of Javascript. Intuitively, there are two more APIs, setImmediate and process.nextTick. Secondly, due to different runtimes, Html Standrad will consider different task queues for different sources such as multiple pages and DOM operations. There are not so many things to consider in Node.js Event Loop.

According to my understanding, the two parties are conceptually consistent and can be summarized as follows (or see here):

• task queue task queue . Some events are defined as tasks, and are often called MacroTask (macro task) to correspond to MicroTask. Each time, the task at the head of the queue will be obtained for execution.

• microtask queue Microtask queue. There will be a microtask queue, and the microtask queue will usually be cleared within a Task.

• And so on.

Performance Measurement

After understanding the above, there is a simple way to measure performance: how many times per second is completed Event Loop loop, or how many MacroTasks are executed, so that we can roughly know the execution of the synchronized code in the code.

After testing the function

class MacroTaskChecker {
    constructor(macroTaskDispatcher, count = 1000, cb = () => { }) {
        this.macroTaskDispatcher = macroTaskDispatcher
        this.COUNT = count
        this.cb = cb
    }
    start(cb) {
        this.cb = cb || this.cb
        this.stop = false
        const scope = () => {
            let count = this.COUNT
            const startTime = performance.now()
            const fn = () => {
                count--
                if (count > 0) this.macroTaskDispatcher(fn)
                else {
                    const endTime = performance.now()
                    // 执行 COUNT 次宏任务之后 计算平均每秒执行了多少个
                    this.cb({
                        avg: this.COUNT / (endTime - startTime) * 1000,
                        timestamp: endTime
                    })
                    !this.stop && this.macroTaskDispatcher(scope)
                }
            }
            this.macroTaskDispatcher(fn)
        }
        scope()
    }

    stop() {
        this.stop = true
    }
}

, execute some infinite loops to test whether intensive synchronous code execution can be detected.

function meaninglessRun(time) {
    console.time('meaninglessRun')
    for (let i = time; i--; i > 0) {
        // do nothing
    }
    console.timeEnd('meaninglessRun')
}

setTimeout(() => {
    meaninglessRun(1000 * 1000 * 1000)
}, 1000 * 5)

setTimeout(() => {
    checker.stop()
    console.log('stop')
}, 1000 * 20)

<span style="font-size: 18px;">setTimeout</span>

const checker = new MacroTaskChecker(setTimeout, 100)

checker.start(v => console.log(`time: ${v.timestamp.toFixed(2)} avg: ${v.avg.toFixed(2)}`))

It can be clearly seen from the output that avg decreases when synchronization is blocked. However, there will be obvious differences between the two tests on browser and node.js. [Related tutorial recommendations: nodejs video tutorial]

// node.js
time: 4837.47 avg: 825.14
time: 4958.18 avg: 829.83
meaninglessRun: 918.626ms
time: 6001.69 avg: 95.95
time: 6125.72 avg: 817.18
time: 6285.07 avg: 635.16
// browser
time: 153529.90 avg: 205.21
time: 154023.40 avg: 204.46
meaninglessRun: 924.463ms
time: 155424.00 avg: 71.62
time: 155908.80 avg: 208.29
time: 156383.70 avg: 213.04

Although we have achieved our goal, using setTimeout is not completely able to accurately record every task. According to HTML Standrad and MDN, setTimeout will wait at least 4ms. Viewed from this angle browser avg * 4ms $\approx$ 1000ms. Node.js probably doesn't follow the browser's convention, but it doesn't record every loop either.

<span style="font-size: 18px;">setImmediate</span>

If you use node.js’ setImmediate:

const checker = new MacroTaskChecker(setImmediate, 1000 * 10)

You can see that the number of executions is about one order of magnitude higher than Node.js setTimeout:

time: 4839.71 avg: 59271.54
time: 5032.99 avg: 51778.84
meaninglessRun: 922.182ms
time: 6122.44 avg: 9179.95
time: 6338.32 avg: 46351.38
time: 6536.66 avg: 50459.77

According to the explanation in the Node.js document, setImmediate Will be executed in the check phase of each loop (phase). Using setImmediate should be able to accurately record every Loop. The number of cycles of my machine is probably between 40,000 and 60,000.

<span style="font-size: 18px;">window.postMessage</span>

Since there is no setImmediate on the browser, we can follow MDN The instructions use window.postMessage to implement one.

如果想在浏览器中实现 0ms 延时的定时器，你可以参考这里所说的 window.postMessage()

const fns = []
window.addEventListener("message", () => {
    const currentFns = [...fns]
    fns.length = 0
    currentFns.forEach(fn => fn())
}, true);
function messageChannelMacroTaskDispatcher(fn) {
    fns.push(fn)
    window.postMessage(1)
}

可以看到和 node.js setImmediate 量级是一致的。

time: 78769.70 avg: 51759.83
time: 78975.60 avg: 48614.49
meaninglessRun: 921.143 ms
time: 80111.50 avg: 8805.14
time: 80327.00 avg: 46425.26
time: 80539.10 avg: 47169.81

<span style="font-size: 18px;">MessageChannel</span>

browser

理论上 browser 使用 MessageChannel 应该也是可以的，还避免了无效的消息被其他 window.addEventListener("message", handler) 接收：

const { port1, port2 } = new MessageChannel();
const fns = []
port1.onmessage = () => {
    const currentFns = [...fns]
    fns.length = 0
    currentFns.forEach(fn => fn())
};
function messageChannelMacroTaskDispatcher(fn) {
    fns.push(fn)
    port2.postMessage(1)
}

不是很懂为啥会比 window.postMessage 频繁一点，同时启动两个 checker 的话可以看到 log 是成对出现的，也就是说一个loop内大家都只执行了一次。我猜测是 window.postMessage 的实现方式消耗会大一些。

time: 54974.80 avg: 68823.12
time: 55121.00 avg: 68493.15
meaninglessRun: 925.160888671875 ms
time: 56204.60 avg: 9229.35
time: 56353.00 avg: 67430.88
time: 56503.10 avg: 66666.67
// 一起执行 wp=window.postMessage mc=MessageChannel
wp time: 43307.90 avg: 25169.90
mc time: 43678.40 avg: 27005.13
wp time: 43678.60 avg: 26990.55
mc time: 44065.80 avg: 25833.12
wp time: 44066.00 avg: 25819.78
mc time: 44458.40 avg: 25484.20

node

在 node.js 上也有 MessageChannel ，是否也可以用来测量loop次数呢？

mc time: 460.99 avg: 353930.80
mc time: 489.52 avg: 355088.11
mc time: 520.30 avg: 326384.64
mc time: 551.78 avg: 320427.29

量级很不正常。理论上不应该超过 setImmediate 的。如果同时启动 setImmediate 和 setTimeout 的 checker:

...
(messagechannel) time: 1231.10 avg: 355569.31
(messagechannel) time: 1260.14 avg: 345825.77
(setImmediate) time: 1269.95 avg: 339.27
(setTimeout) time: 1270.09 avg: 339.13
(messagechannel) time: 1293.80 avg: 298141.74
(messagechannel) time: 1322.50 avg: 349939.04
...

很明显跟不是宏任务了。我猜测 MessageChannel 在 node.js 被归入到跟 socket 等同级别了，就是超出阈值之后的任务会移动到下一个loop中。

总结

使用这种方式去检测性能还挺有趣的，正式使用的话这个指标感觉过于不稳定（即使什么都没做都会有20%-30%的振动）。推荐和其他正经的办法（比如 performance 等）结合。

同时这种方式非常有可能影响正常的 Event Loop，比如 Node.js 中会有一个 pull 的阶段，在执行完全部微任务后，没有任何 timer 的话是会停留在这个阶段，准备马上执行下一个出现的微任务。

顺便复习了下 Event Loop。没想到的是 MessageChannel 在两边的差距居然有这么大。

更多node相关知识，请访问：nodejs 教程！

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