Profiling Node.js apps with Chrome DevTools profiler

Profiling refers to analyzing and measuring an application's performance characteristics.

Profiling helps identify performance bottlenecks in a Node.js app, such as CPU-intensive tasks like cryptographic operations, image processing, or complex calculations.

This post covers running a profiler for various Node.js apps in Chrome DevTools.

Prerequisites

• Google Chrome installed

• Node.js app bootstrapped

Setup

• Run node --inspect app.js to start the debugger.

• Open chrome://inspect, click Open dedicated DevTools for Node and then navigate to the Performance tab. Start recording.

• Run load testing via autocannon package using the following command format npx autocannon <COMMAND>.

• Stop recording in Chrome DevTools.

Profiling

On Perfomance tab in Chrome DevTools open Bottom-Up subtab to identify which functions consume the most time.

Look for potential performance bottlenecks, such as synchronous functions for hashing (pbkdf2Sync) or file system operations (readFileSync).