Why should I use Restify?

Corrigendum: this information is now wrong, keep scrolling!

there was an issue with the script causing the Restify test to be conducted on an unintended route. This caused the connection to be kept alive causing improved performance due to reduced overhead.

This is 2015 and I think the situation has changed a lot since. Raygun.io has posted a recent benchmark comparing hapi, express and restify.

It says:

We also identified that Restify keeps connections alive which removes the overhead of creating a connection each time when getting called from the same client. To be fair, we have also tested Restify with the configuration flag of closing the connection. You’ll see a substantial decrease in throughput in that scenario for obvious reasons.

Looks like Restify is a winner here for easier service deployments. Especially if you’re building a service that receives lots of requests from the same clients and want to move quickly. You of course get a lot more bang for buck than naked Node since you have features like DTrace support baked in.

This is 2017 and the latest performance test by Raygun.io comparing hapi, express, restify and Koa.

It shows that Koa is faster than other frameworks, but as this question is about express and restify, Express is faster than restify.

And it is written in the post

This shows that indeed Restify is slower than reported in my initial test.

According to the Node Knockout description:

restify is a node.js module purpose built to create REST web services in Node. restify makes lots of the hard problems of building such a service, like versioning, error handling and content-negotiation easier. It also provides built in DTrace probes that you get for free to quickly find out where your application’s performance problems lie. Lastly, it provides a robust client API that handles retry/backoff for you on failed connections, along with some other niceties.

Performance issues and bugs can probably be fixed. Maybe that description will be adequate motivation.

I ran into a similar problem benchmarking multiple frameworks on OS X via ab. Some of the stacks died, consistently, after around the 1000th request.

I bumped the limit significantly, and the problem disappeared.

You can you check your maxfiles is at with ulimit, (or launchctl limit < OS X only) and see what the maximum is.

Hope that helps.

In 2021, benchmarking done by Fastify (https://www.fastify.io/benchmarks/) indicates that Restify is now slightly faster than Express.

The code used to run the benchmark can be found here https://github.com/fastify/benchmarks/.