Migrate to ESM and reduce cold start by preloading the fastify instance

[mcollina]

Prerequisites

• I have written a descriptive issue title
• I have searched existing issues to ensure the feature has not already been requested

🚀 Feature Proposal

Check out https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/using-node-js-es-modules-and-top-level-await-in-aws-lambda/. By separating instantiation from execution we can significantly reduce cold starts.

Motivation

No response

Example

No response

[adrai]

interesting... so we could just call await fastify.ready() outside of the handler function (user land) and it should work?

This will probably be a breaking change... I don't know if it will be possible to have esm and commonjs compatibility with the same source...

Are you already working on a POC?

[mcollina]

Not yet, I just saw this today. However it's a great improvement that matches Fastify philosophy.

[adrai]

If I've enough time next week, I'll first migrate all our locize and localistars lambdas to ESM.
Afterwards, I'll try to do some investigations with calling .ready() outside of the lambda handler...

[adrai]

I did a first very simple local test, without any changes to aws-lambda-fastify: https://gist.github.com/adrai/39fa41bda8249f0645c6087efdc5c789

what	without .ready()	with .ready()	difference
import 1)	205ms	1087ms	+530%
handler 1)	910ms	57ms	-94%
import 2)	2ms	2ms	+-0%
handler 2)	1ms	1ms	+-0%
handler 3)	0ms	0ms	+-0%
total	1119ms	1147ms	+2%

phase	without .ready()	with .ready()	difference
Init Duration	205ms	1087ms	+530%
Duration	913ms	60ms	-94%
total	1119ms	1147ms	+2%

invocation	without .ready()	with .ready()	difference
cold	1119ms	1147ms	+2%
cold (with provisioned concurrency)	914ms	60ms	-94%
warm	3ms	3ms	+-0%

So for cold starts using provisioned concurrency there would be a performance optimization of about 882ms (910ms - 57ms) (approx. 80%).
If not using provisioned concurrency, there would be probably no real difference (+2%).

So if I understand this correctly, we do not need to do any change in aws-lambda-fastify.
If someone using provisioned concurrency want to optimize it, the .ready() function can be called outside of the handler: https://gist.github.com/adrai/39fa41bda8249f0645c6087efdc5c789#file-lambda-js-L4

[mcollina]

This is a great blog post BTW ^^.

I think we should only update the documentation.

[adrai]

Will test this first on our production environments... an then, I'll update the readme...

[anthonyroach]

On a project I'm working on I ran into problems using ES modules due you our tooling not supporting it yet (jest and ts-node specifically), and found that it's possible to make a commonjs module look like an ES module to the lambda runtime so you can do await app.ready() entirely at initialization time in a commonjs module. The trick is to make the commonjs module export a Promise that resolves to the exports (e.g. {handler}) like so:

import { app } from './app.js';
import awsLambdaFastify from '@fastify/aws-lambda';

const main = async () => {
  const handler = awsLambdaFastify(app);
  await app.ready();
  return { handler };
};

# note we aren't exporting main here, but rather the result 
# of calling main() which is a promise resolving to {handler}:
module.exports = main();

Posting this here in case it proves useful to anyone else.

[GlenTiki]

I've modified the above for concurrent calls with async initialisation, again, posting for anyone else who might find it useful:

const app = require("./app");
const awsLambdaFastify = require("@fastify/aws-lambda");

let lambdaHandler;
let isInitializing = false;

const main = async () => {
  if (!lambdaHandler && !isInitializing) {
    isInitializing = true;
    lambdaHandler = awsLambdaFastify(app);
    await app.ready();
    isInitializing = false;
  }

  // If initialization is in progress, wait until it's complete
  while (isInitializing) {
    await new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, 10));
  }

  return lambdaHandler;
};

module.exports.handler = async (event, context) => {
  const handler = await main();
  return handler(event, context);
};