Cluster vs manually forking

cluster.js

//Straight from http://nodejs.org/api/cluster.html
var cluster = require('cluster');
var http = require('http');
var numCPUs = require('os').cpus().length;

if (cluster.isMaster) {
  // Fork workers.
  for (var i = 0; i < numCPUs; i++) {
    cluster.fork();
  }

  cluster.on('exit', function(worker, code, signal) {
    console.log('worker ' + worker.process.pid + ' died');
  });
} else {
  // Workers can share any TCP connection
  // In this case its a HTTP server
  http.createServer(function(req, res) {
    res.writeHead(200);
    res.end();
  }).listen(80);
}

manual.js

var net = require('net'),
    child_process = require('child_process'),
    http = require('http'),
    numCPUs = require('os').cpus().length,
    handle, child;

if (process.argv.indexOf('--child') !== -1) {
    //child
    process.on('message', function(message, handle) {
        if (message === 'listen') {
            var server = new http.Server();
            server.on('request', function(req, resp) {
                res.writeHead(200);
                res.end();
            });
            server.listen(handle);
        }
    });
    process.send('handle');
    return;
} else {
    //parent
    handle = net._createServerHandle('0.0.0.0', 80, 4);
    for (var i = 0; i < numCPUs; i++) {
        child = child_process.fork('./run.js', ['--child'], {stdio: [0, 1, 2, 'ipc']});
        (function(c) {
            c.on('message', function(message) {
                if (message === 'handle') {
                    c.send('listen', handle);
                }
            });
        }(child));
    }
}

results.txt

$ echo "{\"test\":true}" > send.txt
$ ab -c 1000 -n 10000 -p send.txt http://127.0.0.1/

cluster.js
=======================================================================================================
Concurrency Level:      1000
Time taken for tests:   1.895 seconds
Complete requests:      10000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      750000 bytes
Total POSTed:           1380000
HTML transferred:       0 bytes
Requests per second:    5277.64 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       189.479 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.189 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          386.55 [Kbytes/sec] received
                        711.24 kb/s sent
                        1097.79 kb/s total

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    4  11.3      0      52
Processing:    37  175  31.2    174     232
Waiting:       31  174  31.5    173     231
Total:         76  179  24.2    176     248



manual.js
======================================================================================================
Concurrency Level:      1000
Time taken for tests:   1.346 seconds
Complete requests:      10000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      753225 bytes
Total POSTed:           1425540
HTML transferred:       0 bytes
Requests per second:    7427.31 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       134.638 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.135 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          546.33 [Kbytes/sec] received
                        1033.98 kb/s sent
                        1580.31 kb/s total

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:       17   49   9.8     49      79
Processing:    10   79  26.0     78     216
Waiting:        7   63  25.4     64     195
Total:         29  128  23.5    128     245