express - What is a good session store for a single-host Node.js production app?

Question

I'm using Node's Express w/ Connect middleware. Connect's memory session store isn't fit for production:

Warning: connection.session() MemoryStore is not designed for a production environment, as it will leak memory, and obviously only work within a single process.

For larger deployments, mongo or redis makes sense.

But what is a good solution for a single-host app in production?

Answer 1

Spent the day looking into this. Here are the options I've discovered. Requests/second are performed via ab -n 100000 -c 1 http://127.0.0.1:9778/ on my local machine.

• no sessions - fast (438 req/sec)
• cookieSession: requires no external service, minor speed impact (311 req/sec) - fastest, sessions will expire with the cookie (customised by maxAge)
• connect-redis: requires redis server, large speed impact (4 req/sec with redis2go and redisgreen) - faster than mongo, sessions will be deleted after a while (customised by ttl)
• connect-mongo - requires mongodb server, large speed impact (2 req/sec with mongohq) - slower than redis, requires manual clear_interval to be set to cleanup sessions

Here is the coffeescript I used for cookieSession:

server.use express.cookieSession({
    secret: appConfig.site.salt
    cookie: maxAge: 1000*60*60
})

Here is the coffeescript I use for redis:

RedisSessionStore ?= require('connect-redis')(express)
redisSessionStore ?= new RedisSessionStore(
    host: appConfig.databaseRedis.host
    port: appConfig.databaseRedis.port
    db: appConfig.databaseRedis.username
    pass: appConfig.databaseRedis.password
    no_ready_check: true
    ttl: 60*60  # hour
)
server.use express.session({
    secret: appConfig.site.salt
    cookie: maxAge: 1000*60*60
    store: redisSessionStore
})

Here is my coffeescript for mongo:

server.use express.session({
    secret: appConfig.site.salt
    cookie:
        maxAge: 100*60*60
    store: new MongoSessionStore({
        db: appConfig.database.name
        host: appConfig.database.host
        port: appConfig.database.port
        username: appConfig.database.username
        password: appConfig.database.password
        auto_reconnect: appConfig.database.serverOptions.auto_reconnect
        clear_interval: 60*60  # hour
    })
})

Now of course, the remote redis and mongo databases will be slower than their local equivalents. I just couldn't get the local equivalents working, especially considering the installation and maintenance time for me was far more than what I was willing to invest when compared with hosted remote alternatives, something I feel is true for others too hence why these hosted remote database services exist in the first place!

For local database benhmarks, see @Mustafa's answer.

Happy for someone to edit this answer to add their local database benchmarks to the mix.