JSON Fast Transfer Protocol

This simple library provides a fast and efficient way to communicate between different Node.js processes using JSON over Unix Domain Sockets.

Performance

For small to medium payloads, this library offers extremely high speed communication with minimal overhead, considerably higher bandwidth and lower latency than popular alternatives.


NOTE: For larger payloads (more than ~96 KB), popular HTTP-based libraries start to quickly outperform this library by a large margin, as their protocol overhead no longer dominates at that scale and actually starts helping.

Benchmarks

Performance comparison of Fastify+Fetch and JFTP

Payload size (KB)	Req/sec		Latency (ms)
	Fastify	JFTP	Fastify	JFTP
~0	10,900	123,400	0.27	0.019
0.5	10,300	98,400	0.28	0.028
1	10,200	84,300	0.28	0.033
2	9,800	65,600	0.29	0.041
4	9,100	46,700	0.30	0.055
8	8,200	30,300	0.33	0.091
12	7,400	22,000	0.35	0.12
16	6,700	17,300	0.38	0.15
24	5,500	12,200	0.45	0.20
32	5,000	9,300	0.50	0.26
48	3,800	6,400	0.64	0.38
64	3,000	4,900	0.78	0.56
72	2,700	4,200	0.86	0.56
96	2,200	3,100	1.04	3.5
128	1,800	2,100	1.31	46.9
256	900	600	2.77	160

Test conducted with JFTP 1.5.1, Fastify 5.5.0, Node.js v22.18.0

JFTP is best suited for scenarios where you need high bandwidth and low latency with small to medium JSON payloads (for example, a backend authentication service, which just transmits tokens or user credentials to other services).

Security

Unix Domain Sockets are not exposed to the network. Instead, they are files in the file system. This typically makes them more secure than communication over localhost. Care should still be taken to ensure that the folder which contains the Unix Domain Socket file is properly permissioned and accessible only to trusted users. This helps prevent unauthorized access to the communication channel.

Server Example

``js
import { UDSocketServer, createSerializer } from 'jftp';
const SOCKET_PATH = './secure_directory/my_socket.sock';

const server = new UDSocketServer();

// Create optional serializer for improved performance
const serializer = createSerializer({
type: 'object',
properties: {
anything: { type: 'string' }
}
});

// Handle incoming connections
server.on('connection', (socket) => {
console.log('Client connected');

// Handle incoming messages
socket.handle((message) => {
console.log('Received message:', message);
socket.schema(serializer); // Use custom serializer for responses
return { anything: 'Hello from server!' };
});

// Handle socket disconnect
socket.on('close', () => {
console.log('Client disconnected');
});

// Handle socket errors
socket.on('error', (error) => {
console.error('Socket error:', error);
});
});

// Listen for incoming connections
server.start(SOCKET_PATH, () => console.log(Server listening on ${SOCKET_PATH}));
`

Client Example

`js
import UDSocket, { createSerializer } from 'jftp';
const SOCKET_PATH = './secure_directory/my_socket.sock';

const socket = new UDSocket({ timeoutMs: 3000 }); //custom timeout

// Create optional serializer for improved performance
const serializer = createSerializer({
type: 'object',
properties: {
anything: { type: 'string' }
}
});

// Handle socket errors
socket.on('error', (error) => {
console.error('Socket error:', error);
});

// Connect to the server
socket.connect(SOCKET_PATH, () => {
console.log("Connected to the server");

// Send a message and wait for a response
socket.schema(serializer).rpc({ anything: 'Hello from client!' })
.then(response => {
console.log('Received response:', response);
})
.catch(error => {
console.error('RPC error:', error);
});
});
``