Node.js and its require() function is too slow

Question

I've built an application on Node.js and works instantly (in 300 ms) on Core i7 processor, Debian Scratch. When I try to run the same application on Raspberry, startup time is 7.2 seconds!.

While debugging, I understand that all waiting takes place on require lines. It comes to this point:

$ touch test.js
$ time node test.js 

real    0m0.930s
user    0m0.820s
sys     0m0.100s

The startup time is pretty much. Here is more timings:

// --------------------------  // startup time: 0.95 seconds
var _ = require('prelude-ls'); // adds 0.05 seconds
var io = require('socket.io'); // adds 2.20 seconds 
var Hapi = require('hapi');    // adds 4.00 seconds 
var zmq = require('zmq');      // adds 0.13 seconds 
process.exit(1)

Is it because of these two libraries, or is there anything to do with Node.js on Raspberry?

Node.js version is v0.12.6

Edit

By the way, top says Node.js consumes 103% of CPU power in these tests.

Answer 1

I would run some more checks against node version 0.10 as hapi doesn't officially support version 0.12. There is some performance regression in version 0.12 that you maybe hitting.