Scalability of server-side application, best approach

Question

I'm programming a server-side application which will manage requests from:

• Game client
• Website (HTTP requests)
• API

As of now I'm using only one (NodeJS) application for every type of requests, the problem is that with a growing user base, this approach will generate a bottle-neck.

I would like some advices on how to develop the server-side architetture so that it'll be scalable.

The only solution that I know of is to use multiple servers with the same application running which will share the same memory (Redis server).

Is it possible in nodeJS to split the management of these types of request into multiple servers? Maybe one or more servers for each type of request?

Currently I'm using:

• NodeJS
• Redis
• MySQL
• Express
• Socket.io

Thanks in advance, can you recommend some books on this matter?

Answer 1

On one machine to handle the power of multicore architecture you can use node.js Cluster module (https://nodejs.org/api/cluster.html).

I think it is a good idea to split API and Website on different applications. If you decide to run multiple node.js applications on one machine try to use pm2 (http://pm2.keymetrics.io/). You could probably split your API on a bunch of small applications - which called microservice architecture. I personally don't like microservice approach you can check the web for pros and cons.

Also if you deploy your application (or bunch of applications) on different virtual/phisycal machines (which is usual in production) you can use haproxy for balancing and fault tolerance (http://www.haproxy.org/).