Fastify and Express are both popular Node.js web application frameworks that enable developers to create server-side applications with ease. While Express has been the go-to choice for many years, Fastify has recently emerged as a promising alternative, offering better performance and additional features. This blog post will delve deeper into the aspects of Fastify that give it an edge over Express.
Fastify has been built from the ground up with a focus on performance. By optimizing various aspects of the framework, Fastify has managed to outperform Express in various benchmarks. Here's a comparison table showcasing their performance:
| Metric | Fastify | Express |
|---|---|---|
| Requests per second | 76,126 | 28,615 |
| Latency (ms) | 3.17 | 10.21 |
| Throughput (MB/s) | 12.01 | 4.51 |
Source: **https://www.fastify.io/benchmarks/**
Fastify's superior performance can be attributed to its streamlined core, built-in libraries, and efficient plugin architecture. These factors combine to make Fastify a more performant choice for modern web applications.
Fastify comes with several built-in libraries that provide additional functionality, further setting it apart from Express. These libraries include:
Pino is a high-performance, low-overhead logging library. It offers a more efficient logging solution than the popular Winston library, which is commonly used with Express. Pino achieves this by generating logs as newline-separated JSON, which is easier to parse and requires less processing overhead. Additionally, Pino offers a range of features, such as child loggers and log redaction, making it a powerful choice for developers.
AJV is a powerful JSON schema validator that ensures incoming requests and outgoing responses adhere to predefined schemas. This validation process helps improve both the security and performance of your API. By validating the shape and content of your data, AJV can detect and reject malformed requests, reducing the likelihood of security vulnerabilities or bugs due to unexpected data.
Fastify uses the Find My Way library for routing, which is a faster and more efficient solution than the built-in routing system in Express. Find My Way offers a simple and intuitive API, which makes it easy to define routes and associated handlers. It also provides advanced features like route parameters, wildcard routes, and custom route constraints.
Avvio is a bootstrapping library used in Fastify that provides a simple, yet powerful, plugin system. It ensures that plugins are loaded and executed in the correct order while offering better error handling than Express. By managing dependencies and execution order, Avvio can minimize the potential for conflicts and improve overall stability.
Fastify and AJV work together to precompile request and response objects, reducing the time required to process requests and improving API response times. By caching these precompiled objects, Fastify can further enhance performance. This approach ensures that AJV validation and serialization are performed only once per schema, minimizing the overhead associated with JSON processing.