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Rishi Kumar
Rishi Kumar

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The Dark Side of CloudWatch Logging in Node.js: A Performance Nightmare

Choosing the right logging tools in Node.js can significantly impact your application's performance. I recently conducted benchmark testing for one of my open-source modules, and the results revealed a critical performance issue when using plain CloudWatch for logging.

Here's what I discovered:

The Pitfall of Plain CloudWatch
CloudWatch is a powerful tool for monitoring and logging, but using it directly in Node.js can severely hinder your application's performance. During my testing, I observed that using plain CloudWatch brought down the request handling capacity of my Node.js application to just over 50,000 requests per minute. This drastic reduction in performance can be a major bottleneck for high-traffic applications.

Benchmark Results
To put this into perspective, I compared the performance of plain CloudWatch with two popular logging libraries, Winston and Pino, both configured to use CloudWatch. Here’s a summary of the results:



Plain CloudWatch: ~54,000+ requests/min
Winston with CloudWatch: Crashed on higher throughput
Pino with CloudWatch: ~295,000+ requests/min


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The difference is staggering. Both Winston and Pino, when used with CloudWatch, show a big contrast in performance. Pino handles over 290,000 requests per minute, while Winston crashed under higher load. This clearly shows that using plain CloudWatch for logging is not just inefficient but harmful to your application's performance.

Benchmark Result Link

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